Abstract

This chapter details how pre-pregnancy care has been taken up clinically and culturally, especially through the emergence of the “reproductive life plan” as a clinical tool. Drawing on expert interviews and an examination of medical pamphlets, professional literature, public health campaign materials, media depictions of pre-pregnancy care, and popular books, this chapter focuses on the individualized and gendered aspects of contemporary pre-pregnancy health ideas. Specifically, the pre-pregnancy care model is shown to reflect a neoliberal health ethos in which women are held individually responsible for the optimization of reproduction in America in the twenty-first century. This chapter makes the case that as reproductive knowledge and policy were produced, so were medicine, morals, and markets.

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