TY - JOUR
T1 - Risk and intersectional power relations
T2 - an exploration of the implications of early COVID-19 pandemic responses for pregnant women
AU - Manca, Terra A.
N1 - Funding Information:
At the time of writing, Terra Manca was funded by an IWK Health postdoctoral fellow grant and a Canadian Immunization Research Network grant in Halifax, Canada; IWK Health Centre. Thanks are extended to Drs Patrick McLane, Laura Alysworth, and Robin Willey for their thoughtful editorial comments. I am also grateful to Drs Janice Graham, Karina Top, Ipek Eren Vural, and Agnieszak Doll for discussions that contributed to my understanding of topics covered in this manuscript. Thanks also to the Gender and COVID-19 Working Group for sharing their collaboratively updated collection of resources, talks, and virtual meetings (https://www.genderandcovid-19.org/).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - The World Health Organization and many national health authorities identifie pregnant women as requiring extra protections during the COVID-19 global pandemic. Nevertheless, many initial responses to the COVID-19 pandemic were implemented in ways that have disrupted the care and support women receive and provide during pregnancy. In this article, I apply an intersectional approach to explore the unintended implications of discourses and practices targeting universal risks of COVID-19 for pregnant women. I discuss three overlapping topics. First, pandemic responses that aimed to negate the universal risk of COVID-19 transmission created obstacles to maternal health care that disproportionately impacted low-income women and regions. For example, rapidly changing public health mandates that were intended to protect the population from the universal threat of COVID-19 have produced unintended results of restricting public transportation, and consequently, access to maternal care. Second, overly precautious healthcare practices aimed at protecting foetuses and new-borns from possible risks can harm women and their new-borns. Recommendations, such as separating women from their new-borns at birth to prevent the spread of COVID-19, are shown to be often entangled with racism and colonialism. Third, in neoliberal contexts, dominant discourses have constructed privileged women as ‘normal’ in a way that responsibilised all women to minimise health risks for their foetuses. Such recommendations ignore inequalities in women’s living conditions and ability to follow public health advice about COVID-19. I argue that responses to COVID-19 were (dis)organised within pre-existing economic, racial, colonial, and patriarchal power relations that disadvantaged some pregnant women more than others.
AB - The World Health Organization and many national health authorities identifie pregnant women as requiring extra protections during the COVID-19 global pandemic. Nevertheless, many initial responses to the COVID-19 pandemic were implemented in ways that have disrupted the care and support women receive and provide during pregnancy. In this article, I apply an intersectional approach to explore the unintended implications of discourses and practices targeting universal risks of COVID-19 for pregnant women. I discuss three overlapping topics. First, pandemic responses that aimed to negate the universal risk of COVID-19 transmission created obstacles to maternal health care that disproportionately impacted low-income women and regions. For example, rapidly changing public health mandates that were intended to protect the population from the universal threat of COVID-19 have produced unintended results of restricting public transportation, and consequently, access to maternal care. Second, overly precautious healthcare practices aimed at protecting foetuses and new-borns from possible risks can harm women and their new-borns. Recommendations, such as separating women from their new-borns at birth to prevent the spread of COVID-19, are shown to be often entangled with racism and colonialism. Third, in neoliberal contexts, dominant discourses have constructed privileged women as ‘normal’ in a way that responsibilised all women to minimise health risks for their foetuses. Such recommendations ignore inequalities in women’s living conditions and ability to follow public health advice about COVID-19. I argue that responses to COVID-19 were (dis)organised within pre-existing economic, racial, colonial, and patriarchal power relations that disadvantaged some pregnant women more than others.
KW - intersectionality
KW - pandemic responses
KW - pregnancy
KW - risk
KW - risk management
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85119324104&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/13698575.2021.1994933
DO - 10.1080/13698575.2021.1994933
M3 - Journal Article
AN - SCOPUS:85119324104
SN - 1369-8575
VL - 23
SP - 321
EP - 338
JO - Health, Risk and Society
JF - Health, Risk and Society
IS - 7-8
ER -