“I'm Just a Woman Having a Baby”: Negotiating and Resisting the Problematization of Pregnancy Fatness

Abstract

This article explores how fat pregnant people construct successful narratives around their pregnancies and birthing. Fat pregnant people are a critical site for the war on fatness; viewed as irresponsible: threatening the health of their pregnancy, and the far-off future of their child. Contemporary knowledge about pregnancy fatness is imbued with longstanding and powerful gendered biomedical discourses that have served to script women's reproductive bodies as faulty and deviant compared to the masculine "norm," priming them for medical management and control. The problematization of pregnancy fatness represents a concerning extension of maternal responsibilization to pregnancy, entangling pregnant people in a politics of preemptive action to secure their children's future health, all the while denying the socio-political, economic and cultural realities of women's lives that constrain their ability to do so. Policy and media responses have located both the causes of, and solutions to, the problem of pregnancy fatness in women's individual self-management imploring them to take responsibility for the necessary lifestyle changes needed to reduce the risks posed by their fat bodies to their babies and the health system. This paper extends critical scholarship on the problematization of pregnancy fatness by identifying the importance of understanding not only how women are oppressed by these dominant discourses but also how they are involved in strategies of negotiation and resistance. By creating space for alternate versions and visions, discursive resistance offers a critical means by which individuals can exercise agency by redefining their lives and recovering their harmed identities.

Women in larger bodies’ experiences with contraception: a scoping review

“…Although women’s perceptions of weight stigma were not examined in any of the reviewed studies, three researchers alluded to the possibility of weight stigma or bias in contraceptive care [ 41 , 42 , 44 ]. This speculation is much in line with previous research in reproductive health care whereby women with higher BMIs have often described negative experiences shaped by disrespectful treatment, presumptuous comments, and the problematization of their bodies [ 26 , 28 , 68 ]. With the ubiquity of weight bias in health care [ 69 , 70 ] and its relation to health care avoidance among individuals with higher BMIs [ 71 – 73 ], it is crucial that future research explore how women in larger bodies navigate contraceptive care.…”

Between blame and care: women's ‘needs talk’ about obesity interventions in prenatal care

“…However, as the women did not wholly agree with assumptions about who they were and what kind of lives they led (a resistance also noted in another article by Parker and Pausé (2018b)), there seemed to be some ambivalence at play. The women's engagement with presenting themselves as healthy, knowledgeable and good mothers implies the negative and devalued character the women more or less consciously positioned themselves against.…”

“…When tests and blood pressure monitoring went well, and when scans showed a ‘normal’ sized foetus, the mothers saw this as evidence that they did not have a need to be more closely monitored. Interestingly other studies also point to women's own birthing experiences and health status as sites of resistance to the biomedical discourse classifying them as risk pregnancies (Parker and Pausé 2018b). Still, in general, the women expected to be monitored for complications and welcomed a system that sprang into motion when complications did arise.…”

“…Yet, other research highlights a more active pregnant subject that challenges the biomedical discourse. For example, studies show how some ‘obese’ pregnant women resist the expert discourse by refusing to view themselves as having poor maternal health (Jarvie , Parker and Pausé 2018b). Another example is how women express that their needs are not met when they experience limited access to proper hospital equipment or are denied prenatal care procedures due to their weight (Keenan and Stapleton , McPhail et al .…”

Womb to womb: Maternal litter size and birth weight but not adult characteristics predict early neonatal death of offspring in the common marmoset monkey

“…Interestingly, we have shown in the past that ovulation number and resultant litter size are associated with maternal mass [ 19 , 30 ], suggesting that there may be an underlying link between maternal weight and stillbirth that we were not able to capture in this sample; we did not show a relationship between maternal adult weight and litter size here. It could also reflect that obesity is problematically cast as a “risk factor” during pregnancy [ 31 ] and that obesity itself may not be “risky” but rather a reflection of a cascade of developmental events and processes that themselves impact outcomes differentially. Recent analyses by the NICHD-established Stillbirth Collaborative Research Network found that models including maternal factors, including obesity, restricted to the immediate pregnancy explained only 19% of the variance in stillbirth outcomes, and nearly a third of stillbirths had no probable cause under current clinical paradigms [ 32 , 33 ].…”