Denied, Embracing, and Resisting Medicalization

Abstract

Teens' experiences with reproductive health care have been ignored by both the “social problems” moral discourse on teen pregnancy and feminist critiques of medicalization. These perspectives are both gendered and racialized in ways that marginalize African American teen mothers. Interview data with 51 poor African American teen mothers suggest that their reproductive experiences occur within very different contexts than those that have inspired feminist criticisms of medicalization. Before their pregnancies, teens are largely denied access to formal health care services and reproductive information and knowledge, and once pregnant, like adult women, they alternately embrace and resist specific aspects of medical care. Their perspectives provide insights into women's experiences with the formal medical system from an understudied social location, and their narratives expand our understanding of how women's and girls' sexuality is socially constructed as problematic and managed, controlled, and regulated in particular ways depending on their social locations.