A Discourse Analysis of Denmark’s Public Health Policy Concerning Overweight among Pregnant Women

A recent Danish public health report classified being overweight during pregnancy as a chronic disease, marking a discursive shift from its previous classification as a risk factor for complications in maternal and foetal health. This discursive shift is considered a breach in the discursive field. Health care professionals’ approach to governing overweight pregnant women is affected by this breach in the discursive field. Thus, overweight pregnant women have become an issue for medical experts, who are encouraged to use stricter rhetoric when addressing them. This shift also renders pregnant women subject to interventions by medical experts. The aim of this article is to critically analyse recommendations for how health professionals should govern these high-risk individuals and to discuss the implications of such governance for overweight pregnant women. In this study, overweight is classified as BMI ≥ 30 and severe obesity is classified as BMI ≥ 35 on the basis of pre-pregnancy weight. The theory of social construction and the concept of governmentality are applied in a discourse analysis of the prevention of overweight among pregnant women in Denmark. Using a discursive approach, this study analyses central governmental documents that discuss obesity prevention. Three forms of freedom (as discipline, as solidarity and as autonomy) are transferred to three forms of governing and constitute the conceptual framework. The main finding is that public health programmes encourage governing through solidarity, including a palette of autonomy-making, responsibility-making and disciplinary technologies, to promote physical health. Public health programmes conjure an image of overweight individuals as strongly burdened subjectivities. The implications for overweight pregnant women are the formation of new subjectivities, engagement in patient associations, the threat of exclusion from communities and social citizenship and other forms of stigmatization.