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.
