Miranda Waggoner, The Zero Trimester: pre-pregnancy care and the politics of reproductive risk

Abstract

Tapping into the flourishing fields of the history and sociology of American pregnancy, Miranda Waggoner enters the fray with her engaging study of the emergence of pre-pregnancy care in the early twenty-first century. Waggoner seeks to determine why pre-pregnancy care emerged when it did and what its development can tell us about contemporary meanings of motherhood, women’s health and medicine. Utilising a wide range of interviews, medical publications and popular media stories and articles, Waggoner claims that this in-depth analysis of pre-pregnancy care exposes the continuing tensions between women’s health and reproductive health, as well as the continued distance between maternal health rhetoric and reproductive realities. Over the past 15 years, the CDC and many other health advocates have constructed a new framework for pregnancy, one that stresses the importance of the health and lifestyle of women who are not pregnant (regardless of whether they intend to get pregnant in the near future or not). Waggoner analyses the work and rhetoric of these groups and finds that while they often describe pre-pregnancy care as a new attempt to increase positive outcomes and combat the continual high rates of unplanned pregnancies in the face of modern acknowledgements of the limits of traditional prenatal care, the public campaigns, clinical encounters and medical publications coming out of this field reiterate old tropes of the centrality of maternity in American femininity and the differential racial understandings of reproduction and motherhood.