Premium
Responsible Choices: Situating Pregnancy Intention among Haitians in South Florida
Author(s) -
Fordyce Lauren
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
medical anthropology quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.855
H-Index - 55
eISSN - 1548-1387
pISSN - 0745-5194
DOI - 10.1111/j.1548-1387.2011.01166.x
Subject(s) - futures contract , abortion , gender studies , situated , ethnography , sociology , legislation , unintended pregnancy , power (physics) , trace (psycholinguistics) , political science , pregnancy , family planning , law , population , anthropology , research methodology , demography , philosophy , artificial intelligence , linguistics , computer science , financial economics , genetics , biology , quantum mechanics , physics , economics
In this article, I focus on unintended pregnancy as a means to interrogate the intersections of abortion and prenatal discourses in the United States, and the ways in which these discourses assume certain kinds of moral, liberal subjects. Using media material, congressional legislation, public health policy, and ethnographic data from South Florida (2004–06), I trace how these discourses assume that women will behave in “rational,”“responsible” ways to plan their reproductive futures, and how these assumptions intersect with Haitian women migrants’ lived experiences in South Florida. My research illustrates how decisions about family planning are situated within particular local moral worlds, where gender relations, religion, power, and desires for children inform women's everyday lives. [unintended pregnancy, Haitian migrants, maternal responsibility]