Don’t say “the D word”: Exploring death taboo and biopower in pregnancy loss awareness advocacy

Abstract

Public relations (PR) has explored a host of taboo and stigma riddled health topics to understand the role of communication and advocacy to improve wellbeing. However, PR scholarship has not sufficiently investigated taboo as a mechanism of social control within sociocultural theory or the role of the discipline in shaping meanings about death and bereavement. As a step in this endeavor, this study explored pregnancy loss through a sociocultural perspective of PR. It employs Foucault’s biopower to tease out how pregnancy loss awareness advocates/activists perceive taboo as regulation and their methods to push back on such constraints through advocacy. Using in-depth interviews with U.S. pregnancy loss awareness advocates/activists (17), findings explicate how participants see taboo as regulating pregnancy loss through isolation, invalidation, erasure, and conflation. Findings also speak to the ways that they resist such regulation by framing pregnancy loss as a public health issue, building community, and reclaiming parental identity. This study offers implications for sociocultural PR by illustrating the complex regulatory functions taboos serve, presenting experience-based community as productive use of power, and considering the nuances of advocacy in the context of death.