Abstract
The role of the women's magazine Claudia as a pedagogic device in the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth in Brazil is discussed. The analysis of issues from the magazine's first three decades shows how information in this field was presented and taught, articulating elements of biomedicine, technology, and consumption. Under the aegis of the supremacy of scientific rationality and politics of risk, pregnancy and childbirth were resignified and incorporated into new medical and technological regimes, which included the need for women to internalize the desire and obligation to be healthy during pregnancy and produce healthy children. Claudia translated new scientific and medical knowledge for its readers, along with new norms of motherhood, reflecting the complexity and multiple agency of medicalization.
Highlights
The early decades of the twentieth century witnessed the development and legitimization of medical knowledge geared towards the rational rearing of children, by spreading the rules of puericulture, or infant hygiene, and getting women to observe them, constituting what has been called “scientific motherhood” (Freire, 2009)
Under the aegis of the supremacy of scientific rationality and politics of risk, pregnancy and childbirth were resignified and incorporated into new medical and technological regimes, which included the need for women to internalize the desire and obligation to be healthy during pregnancy and produce healthy children
By the end of the twentieth century, this had changed dramatically: contraceptive technologies call for rational birth control; with effective diagnostic methods, pregnancy should be detected at an early stage; news of pregnancy immediately prompts a quest for medical services, where it is the object of technological monitoring and oversight; hospital is the place for giving birth, and medical and technological interventions are part of the “natural” birthing environment; and public health services aspire to attain 100% coverage of prenatal services and professionally assisted delivery
Summary
FREIRE, Maria Martha de Luna; BONAN, Claudia; NAKANO, Andreza Rodrigues. Medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth in the pages of Claudia, 1961-1990. Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos, Rio de Janeiro, v.25, n.4, out.-dez.
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