Dr. Sam Allen Wright // Four days before I saw a faint second line on a pregnancy test, I got my first COVID vaccine. I knew that I could be pregnant when I got the shot. In fact, that’s why I wanted the vaccine so badly; I knew that COVID caused increased risks for pregnant…
Tag: pregnancy
What does it mean to be a triplet anyway?
Steven Rhue // What is a triplet anyway? Well . . . me. I am one of three. A sibling to a brother and a sister. We were born in the same year, on the same day, at approximately the same time, and as it would imply, we are the same age. A more…
COVID-19 as a New Structural Barrier to Equitable Health among Expectant Black Women in the US
Katey E. Mari// COVID-19 has created yet another structural barrier for equitable access to healthcare and health among Black pregnant women in the US, particularly in areas affected by racial residential segregation. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, discussions surrounding the social determinants of health as they relate to COVID-19 morbidity and mortality trends…
Review: Cesarean Sections & Risk: Ongoing Evolution of a Procedure
John A. Carranza // On September 19, 2019, the website Motherly posted an article entitled “These Birth Photos Prove How Beautiful Clear Drape C-Sections Can Be.” Heather Marcoux, the author, explained what “gentle cesarean sections” are and how they have come to transform the cesarean section procedure in contemporary medicine. Previously, the operation included physicians…
How can HIV-positive women be good mothers?
Sasheenie Moodley // We are told that a “good mother” is the trope of a mother who is loving and nurturing (Chess, 1982; Mercer, 1985). She prioritises and protects her infant. This mother has a good relationship with her “happy” infant (Benedek, 1959). It is a good mother’s job to understand her child’s behaviour and…
Part I: Political Pregnancies in the Italian City States
Claire Litt // In early modern Italy, there was enormous pressure on noblewomen to produce healthy male children. The security of ruling families’ lines of succession (and the political stability of the city-states they ruled) were often precariously dependant on the reproductive health of only one or two women who married into each family. For…
Mother-tales: otherness and doubt in the neonatal intensive care unit
Emily Wheater // Recently in Synapsis, Jessica M.E. Kirwan discussed the portrayal by male, Enlightenment-era physicians of mothers in obstetric texts and images. William Hunter’s illustrations of pregnant bodies are deeply dehumanising in their presentation of butchered female bodies, and gradually stripping away the mother’s body altogether leaving just the uterus behind. What a wonderful…
Colonizing the Womb: How William Hunter’s Enlightenment-Era Gynecological Images Redefined Personhood
Jessica M.E. Kirwan // Pictures are received information. We need no formal education to ‘get the message.’ The message is instantaneous.-Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics. New York: Harper Collins, 1993.
Existential Research Notes, Or Pregnancy in the News
Livia Arndal Woods // For the better part of the past decade, my scholarship has focused on representations of pregnancy in the Victorian novel. This focus has often resonated with 21st century pregnancy narratives, and I’ve written about that. I’ve written less about the ways in which my scholarship has resonated with my lived experience…
“bodies mutilated for the nation”: Reproductive Rights and Women of Color Across Time
Sydnee Wagner and Alicia Andrzejewski // “Colonizers want land, but indigenous bodies forming nations are in the way because they form a strong attachment to land and because they replicate indigeneity…[the colonizers] see Indigenous women’s and girls’ bodies as the bodies that reproduce nations”—Leanne Betasamosake Simpson Introduction Our title’s opening quote, “bodies mutilated for the…