
Series
Volume 54
Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives
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Invisible Labours
The Reproductive Politics of Second Trimester Pregnancy Loss in England
Aimee Louise Middlemiss
Made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from the Economic and Social Research Council [grant numbers ES/J50015X/1, ES/X00712X/1] and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter, UK.
256 pages, bibliog., index
ISBN 978-1-80539-257-6 $135.00/£99.00 / Hb / Not Yet Published (February 2024)
Reviews
“This is an excellent book … As someone working in the field of reproduction/family studies (though not specifically on pregnancy loss), this book has expanded my thinking regarding how legal, medical, kinship systems and cultures come together in defining our understandings of life/death, personhood and relatedness.” • Leah Gilman, University of Manchester
“This is an excellent, well-written, well researched manuscript on an important and timely issue. The book successfully introduces nuance, contestation, and diversity into constructions of personhood in the English context by detailed exploration of second trimester pregnancy loss.” • Susie Kilshaw, University College London
Description
Tracing women’s experiences of miscarriage and termination for foetal anomaly in the second trimester, before legal viability, shows how such events are positioned as less ‘real’ or significant when the foetal being does not, or will not, survive. Invisible Labours describes the reproductive politics of this category of pregnancy loss in England. It shows how second trimester pregnancy loss produces specific medical and social experiences, revealing an underlying teleological ontology of pregnancy. Some women then use an alternative understanding of pregnancy based on kinship with the second trimester foetal being or baby to resist the erasure of their experience.
Aimee Louise Middlemiss is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, University of Exeter, UK. Her research interests include reproduction, death, personhood, kinship, embodiment, and gender.
Subject: Anthropology (General)Medical AnthropologyGender Studies and Sexuality
Area: Europe
Invisible Labours by Aimee Louise Middlemiss is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) with support from the Economic and Social Research Council [grant numbers ES/J50015X/1, ES/X00712X/1] and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter, UK.
OA ISBN: 978-1-80539-211-8