womens pregnancy

Pregnancy: the cultural context

Pregnancy occupies potent symbolic space in cultures around the world. As both the development of a life and a significant transitional event within the woman's lifespan, pregnancy becomes the focus of cultural desires and anxieties around gender, power, selfhood, and even nationhood. Medical technology has increasingly refigured the physiological possibilities of pregnancy, especially through assisted reproduction for the infertile, its extensions to surrogacy and older-age pregnancy, and through genetic testing.

One of the most common cultural mythologies about pregnancy is that it is evidence of full womanhood. Because mothering is so closely tied into cultural gender roles, to be pregnant is to fulfill one's gendered destiny. Although this emphasis on pregnancy emerges from culturally-specific definitions of femininity and womanhood, many people see the urge as instinctive and the process itself as natural, even as industrialized countries increasingly rely on medical technologies to avoid, create, sustain, and complete pregnancies.

Differential worldwide rates of fertility, infant mortality, and maternal mortality have led the World Health Organization to focus attention on women's differential access to services and opportunities with respect to men as well as between different countries and regions. At least partly because of this focus, all three of these rates dropped by about one-third over the twenty years up to 1998, when overall fertility rate was 2.7 births per woman; Europe was lowest at 1.6, while Africa remained highest at 5.4. Infant mortality rate world-wide was 57 deaths per 1000 live births, whereas highly industrialized countries such as the US and the UK had rates as low as 7 deaths per 1000. Maternal mortality rate (expressed as deaths per 100 000 births) in the UK showed a dramatic drop from the 1930s onwards, whereas until then it had been essentially unchanged at around 500 for 100 years; in the 1980s it was below 10. By the end of the twentieth century, according to the World Health Organization, developed nations averaged a rate of 27 deaths per 100 000 live births. This contrasts with 480 on average in developing nations (comparable to Victorian Britain), with some regions as high as 1000. The global average was 430. While these numbers are specific to pregnancy, and associated with disparities in medical services and supplies, they may also reflect the status of girls and women in different cultures, and their relative power in their societies.

Pregnancy, in the natural order of things, becomes possible and physiologically appropriate as soon as ovulation is established after the menarche, usually during the teens, or even earlier. But in modern developed societies, the issue of teenage pregnancy is increasingly a concern to both moral leaders and health educators. In the UK the rate has been rising: in 1997, under-16s accounted for over 8% of all known conceptions in the under-20 age group; meanwhile rates declined in other European countries and in the US there has been some reduction since the late 1980s. The spectre of the pregnant young girl is often cited as a wake-up call for issues as diverse as promiscuity, health education, and the viability of the welfare state.

Young women who maintain pregnancies are less likely to finish or continue their education, face greater marital instability, have fewer lifelong assets, and have lower incomes later in life than women who did not become pregnant young. Yet pregnant teenagers have become symbolic more of the decline of social morality than of the lack of resources granted to young women worldwide.