Showing 1 - 2 of 2 Items
“I felt so untrustworthy of my ability to get pregnant”: Women’s Embodied Uncertainties and Decisions to Become Pregnant
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Theodora K. Hurley
Access: Open access
- This paper identifies “embodied uncertainties”—possibilities of aging and infertility lodged within the body—as informing women’s conceptualizations of their reproductive bodies and their decisions about and approaches to getting pregnant. Using data from semi-structured interviews with a small sample of highly educated, professional, white women who had given birth within 18 months prior, this paper argues that (bio)medicalized risk discourses and neoliberal logics of responsible choice-making lodge uncertainty and the possibility of failure within women’s reproductive bodies. As they attempt to reconcile childbearing with professional and financial constraints, women may identify their bodies as laden with embodied uncertainties and may subsequently adopt strategies for becoming pregnant that seek to mitigate those embodied uncertainties, such as by trying to conceive before feeling completely ready for a pregnancy. Ultimately, (bio)medicalization and neoliberalism have transformed reproductive aging and infertility into individualized concerns and foreclosed recognition of the institutional failures that create conflicts of aging, careers, and childbearing in women’s lives.
Social support buffers the effects of maternal prenatal stress on infants' unpredictability
Date: 2021-06-01
Creator: Lea Takács, Jiří Štipl, Maria Gartstein, Samuel P. Putnam, Catherine, Monk
Access: Open access
- Objective: Exposure to stress in pregnancy has been shown to affect fetal development with short- and long-term physiological and behavioral consequences for the offspring. Although social support is known to lower perceived stress, no prior study has investigated the buffering role of social support in the context of prenatal stress effects on infant temperament. The aim of this study was to examine interactive effects of prenatal stress and social support on several dimensions of infant temperament at 9 months postpartum. Study design: A total of 272 mothers completed the Perceived Stress Scale and the Perceived Social Support Scale in the 3rd trimester of pregnancy. Infant temperament was assessed by mothers at 9 months postpartum using the Infant Characteristics Questionnaire. Linear regression models were performed to assess the effects of perceived stress, social support, and their interaction on infant temperament. Results: Prenatal stress interacted with social support, such that prenatal stress increased infant unpredictability when social support was below -0.5 SD. Conclusions: Prenatal stress was found to be a risk factor for infant temperamental unpredictability when combined with low social support perceived by the mother during pregnancy. Support of others, not previously examined in this context, can reduce the impact of prenatal stress.