Since the 1980s, maternal and child health experts have sought to redefine maternity care to include the period prior to pregnancy, essentially by expanding the concept of prenatal care to encompass the time before conception. In 2004, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention endorsed and promoted this new definition when it launched the Preconception Health and Health Care Initiative. In arguing that prenatal care was often too little too late, a group of maternal and child health experts in the United States attempted to spur improvements in population health and address systemic problems in health care access and health disparities. By changing the terms of pregnancy risk and by using maternalism as a social policy strategy, the preconception health and health care paradigm promoted an ethic of anticipatory motherhood and conflated women’s health with maternal health, sparking public debate about the potential social and clinical consequences of preconception care. This article tracks the construction of this policy idea and its ultimate potential utility in health and health policy discussions.
The epigenetic “revolution” in science cuts across many
disciplines, and it is now one of the fastest growing research areas in biology.
Increasingly, claims are made that epigenetics research represents a move away
from the genetic determinism that has been prominent both in biological research
and in understandings of the impact of biology on society. We discuss to what
extent an epigenetic framework actually supports these claims. We show that, in
contrast to the received view, epigenetics research is often couched in language
as deterministic as genetics research in both science and the popular press. We
engage the rapidly emerging conversation about the impact of epigenetics on
public discourse and scientific practice, and we contend that the notion of
epigenetic determinism – or the belief that epigenetic mechanisms
determine the expression of human traits and behaviors – matters for
understandings of the influence of biology and society on population health.
As medical reports over the last decade indicate that food allergies among children are on the rise, peanut allergies in particular have become a topic of intense social debate. While peanut allergies are potentially fatal, they affect very few children at the population level. Yet, peanut allergies are characterized in medical and popular literature as a rising “epidemic,” and myriad and broad-based social responses have emerged to address peanut allergy risk in public spaces. This analysis compares medical literature to other textual sources, including media reports, legislation, and advocacy between 1980 and 2010 in order to examine how peanut allergies transformed from a rare medical malady into a contemporary public health problem. I argue that the peanut allergy epidemic was co-constructed through interactions between experts, publics, biomedical categories, and institutions, while social reactions to the putative epidemic expanded the sphere of surveillance and awareness of peanut allergy risk. The characterization of the peanut allergy problem as an epidemic was shaped by mobility across social sites, with both discursive and material effects.
In both social science and medicine, research on reproduction generally focuses on women. In this article, we examine how men’s reproductive contributions are understood. We develop an analytic framework that brings together Cynthia Daniels’ conceptualization of reproductive masculinity (2006) with a staged view of reproduction, where the stages include the period before conception, conception, gestation, and birth. Drawing on data from two medical sites that are oriented to the period before pregnancy (preconception health care and sperm banks), we examine how gendered knowledge about reproduction produces different reproductive equations in different stages of the reproductive process. We conclude with a new research agenda that emerges from rethinking the role of men and masculinity in reproduction.
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