{"title":"On the Margins of Maternity: Low-Income Women’s Experiences of Maternity Care in Late Twentieth-Century Glasgow","authors":"Janet Greenlees","doi":"10.1093/shm/hkae011","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Summary The healthcare provided to expectant mothers impacts the health outcomes of the mother and infant, or infants, and reflects current social and political priorities which mirror middle-class values and leave poorer women feeling socially isolated. Utilising focus group interviews with nineteen women who were living on low-incomes in Glasgow, Scotland, when they delivered their first child between the 1970s and early 2000s, this article analyses the women’s recollections of their maternity care experiences within the changing middle-class health context. It reveals how expectant mothers remembered feeling healthcare practitioners prioritised the needs of the embryo/foetus/infant before their own. The women recalled feeling stigmatised for being pregnant and poor. While interviewees identified individual caring practitioners, overall a disconnect remained between the middle-class healthcare providers and the needs of low-income mothers. Finally, this article suggests that co-creating history with a third-sector organisation could offer a potential methodology for addressing the middle-class bias of official sources.","PeriodicalId":21922,"journal":{"name":"Social History of Medicine","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6000,"publicationDate":"2024-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Social History of Medicine","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkae011","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"HISTORY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Summary The healthcare provided to expectant mothers impacts the health outcomes of the mother and infant, or infants, and reflects current social and political priorities which mirror middle-class values and leave poorer women feeling socially isolated. Utilising focus group interviews with nineteen women who were living on low-incomes in Glasgow, Scotland, when they delivered their first child between the 1970s and early 2000s, this article analyses the women’s recollections of their maternity care experiences within the changing middle-class health context. It reveals how expectant mothers remembered feeling healthcare practitioners prioritised the needs of the embryo/foetus/infant before their own. The women recalled feeling stigmatised for being pregnant and poor. While interviewees identified individual caring practitioners, overall a disconnect remained between the middle-class healthcare providers and the needs of low-income mothers. Finally, this article suggests that co-creating history with a third-sector organisation could offer a potential methodology for addressing the middle-class bias of official sources.
期刊介绍:
Social History of Medicine , the journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine, is concerned with all aspects of health, illness, and medical treatment in the past. It is committed to publishing work on the social history of medicine from a variety of disciplines. The journal offers its readers substantive and lively articles on a variety of themes, critical assessments of archives and sources, conference reports, up-to-date information on research in progress, a discussion point on topics of current controversy and concern, review articles, and wide-ranging book reviews.