The Social Construction Of Chinese Urban Women Pregnant Medicalization

With the continuous development of biomedical technology,there have been great changes in maternal behavior among China's urban pregnant women.Pregnancy has changed from a natural process to doctor's intervention in the medical process,from self-care to regular examination in medical institutions.During prenatal care and the routine use of all kinds of genetic screening technology,medical authority is expanding and pregnant medicalization is coming to exist.Pregnant medicalization is a social construction process,during which multiple actors interact each other to reach a consensus of action and practice.Therefore,this dissertation aimed to study how nation,medical institution,market and mothers have endowed prenatal testing with new social meaning and value,and revealed the dynamic power relations of different actors during the process of pregnant medicalization.Taking Foucault bio-power theory as the framework,we find that population and individual body are both objectives of government discipline.In the government's management level,by using the health care policy and the perfection of modern antenatal examination system,the quality of the population was improved.In terms of individual body discipline,the national family planning institutions extended to broader authorities,extensive social propaganda and health educations were used for prevention and control of birth defects.Under the modern mothering discourse,urban women internalize the words "science",and continuously through self-management to pursue the "quality" of the fetus.In the level of medical institutions,by using medical social control theory,we found that the doctor began to change the "patient" by the use of authority knowledge.Obstetric medical authority use modern knowledge and constantly promote the use of medical model to define and understand pregnancy.The concept of "high risk pregnant women" was used to legalize medical surveillance of the female body.At the same time in the process of interaction,prenatal screening and diagnosis were introduced as a routine examination to pregnant women.In this process,obstetrics has realized the standardization of pregnancy medical intervention,and the control process of the quality of fetus.Market factors also contributed to the promotion of the development of health care during pregnancy.Under the background of medical marketization,pregnancy risk discourse was emphasized to strengthen the risk of pregnancy women.Through the process of commercialization of prenatal health care,health and disease problems were constructed as pregnant women "personal responsibility".Under the pressure pregnant women need to choose from a variety of prenatal tests to ensure the health of the fetus.We found that pregnant women's risk perception is beyond the scope of the medical model risk.The experiences,the grasp of the medical knowledge,attitude to information provided by the medical tests,and its understanding of mothers' role can affect the risk perception of pregnancy women.In the process of medical decision-making,women need to consider all the risk factors in order to make the best choice for the fetus.Although pregnant women can make some choice,the choice is limited.Pregnant women in the face of modern medicine discipline,risk discourse and scientific discourse of women's mothering role,its choice is restricted by the social and cultural factors.From the moment of pregnancy,the female body was structured by nation,medical institutions,and the market.Pregnant women have to subject herself to the country,the medical institutions and the market discipline power by learning modern knowledge during pregnancy,and choosing medical practice to produce a "perfect" fetus.Obstetrics,which has long been considered as neutral and objective knowledge to ensure the safety of maternal and infan,standardize social control and intervention during pregnancy the in the daily practice.We admit that the necessity of medical intervention,but at the same time we criticize the unnecessary medical intervention and the use of standardized prenatal care to treat each living and unique women as the same during pregnancy.