Abstract

​

Childbirth has been in the research agenda of sociologists and feminist scholars for almost four decades, from the deconstruction of the reproductive role of women to the critiques of medicalisation and hospitalisation. Yet, the plurality of perspectives and the inherent complexity of childbirth have contributed to the lack of consensus and the inexpressive consolidation of the sociology of human reproduction as a domain. Despite its relevance, the voice of the social sciences has been mostly absent in the debates around the need to improve maternity care in Europe. Local, state-level, and cross-national initiatives aiming at the discussion and implementation of change in maternity care delivery are mainly grounded on the reifying perspectives from evidence-based medicine. Potential contributions that tackle the non-linearity of human reproduction are tendentially overlooked. This session will focus on this neglected aspect of birth experience and will consider childbirth from the perspective of citizen - state relations. Both human reproduction and research about it are of political nature. Maternity care forms an arena where different actors struggle for control over (female) reproductive experiences, and citizenship issues are deeply intertwined with these struggles. The right to choose the place of birth collides with a citizen’s duty to procreate responsibly, and the right to choose a birth assistant can be at odds with official medical regulations enforced by the state. All these tensions are overlaid by an unequal assess to childbirth services for different groups of citizens. While citizenship, regarding childbirth, can be developed in many ways, we intend to focus on the spatial dimension of this relation. This dimension runs through research topics as different as national regulations of childbirth services (that are inherently bound to territory) and intimate spatiality of homebirth; global social movements related to birth (for e.g., international midwifery movement) and local childbirth traditions that are either extinguishing or being reinvented. By acknowledging this non-linear and complex interplay between citizenship and spatiality regarding reproductive experiences, childbirth might be simultaneously considered as a political act, a matter of public health, a stage for professional interaction, an opportunity for women’s individual agency and self-government, a gendered and gendering phenomenon, a biographic milestone, or a set of embodied experiences. Transdisciplinary approaches and the opening of the social sciences have been pointed out as strategies for the integration of this complexity in the design of health research, its dissemination, and its translation into practice.

In this session, we aim to discuss the contributions of health and medical sociological research to the debate around contemporary human reproduction, and their potential for transdisciplinary approaches. We particularly welcome abstracts focusing on how space and non-normative birth places intertwine with the role of the state and the construction of different modalities of reproductive citizenship, different relations with the labouring body, and different embodied experiences of childbirth.

​

Session organizer(s)

​

Mário Santos (PT) – is a research assistant at the University Institute of Lisbon (https://ciencia.iscte-iul.pt/mjdss/en). He is a PhD candidate, focusing on the social dynamics of home births. He is a member of the European network BIRTH (https://eubirthresearch.eu/) and member of steering committee of the Babies Born Better international survey (www.babiesbornbetter.org).

 

Ekaterina Borozdina (RU) – is a research fellow at the Gender Studies Research Programme of European University at Saint-Petersburg, Russia. She obtained her PhD in sociology from the Sociological Institute of Russian Academy of Science in 2012 with a study of impact of maternity care reforms in Russia.

​