Fit to Reproduce? The Regulative Role of Pregnancy Texts

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of popular UK-based guides to pregnancy. A discursive approach is adopted to explicate the interpretative repertoires used to construct pregnancy. ‘Planning for pregnancy’ incites women to engage in self-disciplining practices relating to the (pre)pregnant body, the self and ‘transforming the environment’. The easy combination and repeated use of these practices in conjunction with a repertoire of ‘pregnancy as risk’ serves to mask diversity and to decontextualize and individualize pregnancy to render it separate from women’s other relationships, identities and knowledges, with little regard for the specific circumstances in which women become/are pregnant. Medicalized discourses position women with limited agency, while, by means of repertoires of ‘choice’ informed by ‘woman-centred’ discourses, women are construed as consumers, taking responsibility for themselves and their babies. A tension is manifest in that the responsibility and blame for ‘abnormality’ or ‘unsuccessful’ outcomes is located with individual women/parents. We argue that through both medicalized and ‘womancentred’ discourses, reproduction remains a key site for the regulation of women.