Abortion, Motherhood, and Mental Health: Medicalizing Reproduction in the United States and Great Britain by Ellie Lee
Requirements: PDF Readers, 4MB
Overview: Whatever reproductive choices women make–whether they opt to end a pregnancy through abortion or continue to term and give birth–they are considered to be at risk of suffering serious mental health problems. According to opponents of abortion in the United States, potential injury to women is a major reason why people should consider abortion a problem. On the other hand, becoming a mother can also be considered a big risk. This fine, well-balanced book is about how people represent the results of reproductive choices. It examines how and why pregnancy and its various outcomes have come to be discussed this way.
The author’s interest in the medicalization of reproduction–its representation as a mental health problem–first arose in relation to abortion. There is a very clear contrast between the construction of women who have abortions, implied by moralized argument against abortion, and the construction that results when the case against abortion focuses on its effects on women’s mental health. Lee argues that claims that connect abortion with mental illness have been limited in their influence, but this is not to suggest that they have not become a focus for discussion and have had no impact. The limits to such claims about abortion do not, by any means, suggest limits to the process of the medicalization of pregnancy more broadly, that is, a process of demedicalization.
Genre: Nonfiction, Health, Social Science
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