Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PregDaT (Pregnancy Dating Challenges: Technologies and Unequal Geographies of Abortion and Childbirth Care)
Reporting period: 2023-09-01 to 2026-02-28
Pregnancy dating, or the assessment of the duration of the gestation, is considered the most important step in the management of any pregnancy for obstetric and neonatal care. It is on the estimated starting date of the pregnancy that the whole chain of care (e.g. prenatal screening, childbirth plans) is established and access to a variety of critical pregnancy, childbirth and abortion options are regulated. Although considered a standard procedure, pregnancy dating varies greatly in accuracy and methods, and across services and countries, and depends on technologies, resources, and skills of those involved. In this process, pregnant people’s embodied knowledge is often disregarded as unreliable. Despite bearing major and life-changing consequences, pregnancy dating remains largely unquestioned in the social sciences and in medical and public health literature. This has profound effects on how pregnancy has been theorised and empirically studied as well as on legal provisions and clinical practices.
PregDaT aims at transforming existing paradigms of understanding and studying pregnancy and reproduction by exposing the socio-technical, discursive and political components of pregnancy and reproductive time, and exploring whether and how these generate unequal access to abortion and childbirth care for different groups in different locations. PregDaT researchers will employ qualitative methods from STS, anthropology, feminist legal studies, public health studies and visual design to investigate the process of pregnancy dating in 4 European countries, both in metropolitan areas and in peripheral locations. In so doing, they will learn in what ways time and temporalities of pregnancy are constructed; what understanding of gendered bodies inform and are informed by such process; what kind of unequal paths to care are generated through it; how medicalization and self-care are balanced throughout the process in different ways; and what subjectivities emerge through the process.
The results will lead PregDaT researchers to reshape scholarly understanding of pregnancy and pregnant subjectivities and temporalities, and their relationship with technoscientific knowledges and practices. Moreover, analysis of the results promises to advance our understanding of the role of health data and medical metrics in shaping the medical knowledge, management and experience of pregnancy.
The project is also likely to produce recommendation on how to perform GA assessment in a more inclusive and person-centred care mode and to foster a critical analysis of the role of GA assessment in regulating access to abortion and childbirth care and in the definition of birthing rights.
PregDaT aims at transforming existing paradigms of understanding and studying pregnancy and reproduction by exposing the socio-technical, discursive and political components of pregnancy and reproductive time, and exploring whether and how these generate unequal access to abortion and childbirth care for different groups in different locations. PregDaT researchers will employ qualitative methods from STS, anthropology, feminist legal studies, public health studies and visual design to investigate the process of pregnancy dating in 4 European countries, both in metropolitan areas and in peripheral locations. In so doing, they will learn in what ways time and temporalities of pregnancy are constructed; what understanding of gendered bodies inform and are informed by such process; what kind of unequal paths to care are generated through it; how medicalization and self-care are balanced throughout the process in different ways; and what subjectivities emerge through the process.
The results will lead PregDaT researchers to reshape scholarly understanding of pregnancy and pregnant subjectivities and temporalities, and their relationship with technoscientific knowledges and practices. Moreover, analysis of the results promises to advance our understanding of the role of health data and medical metrics in shaping the medical knowledge, management and experience of pregnancy.
The project is also likely to produce recommendation on how to perform GA assessment in a more inclusive and person-centred care mode and to foster a critical analysis of the role of GA assessment in regulating access to abortion and childbirth care and in the definition of birthing rights.
Ethnographic research has started in three of the four countries covered by the project and will start soon in the fourth too. The project team has participated in several academic and public engagement initiatives (national and international conferences, workshops and festivals) that have contributed to refine the project's theoretical elaboration in dialogue with experts in the wider domain of reproductive studies and with other interdiscplinary approaches, such as legal studies, public health, history and geography and have allowed conversations with different kind of audiences. The team has organised dedicated workshops on reproductive temporalities, on ethnography of reproductive uncertainties, and on the use of ethnographic insight for legal analysis.
Results of this research have the potential to challenge current concepts used to describe, analyse and discuss pregnancy and abortion, as they will expose how temporalities are constructed in the clinical settings and lived through by pregnancy people or people having an abortion, ultimately revealing the techno-scientific and experiential components of the notion of pregnancy itself. These results will be used to propose alternative narratives to pregnancy temporalities, which will take into account the ways in which pregnant people in the different contexts covered by the research study experience them. They will also be used to bring into dialogue the variety of individual experiences with professional approaches to pregnancy care and abortion, eventually leading to drafting recommendations around how to take on a person-centred approach to pregnancy care in relation to pregnancy and abortion temporalities.