Bernadette Tillard

Mots-clés: Naissance - Parenté - Stigmatisation - Pauvreté

Marginalization or stigmatization? Ethnographic research on birth in urban contexts
After an ethnographic study about birth in an urban environment, we note the characteristics of the women we met in this popular district. These young women are mainly living in economic precariousness. In spite of the diversity of personal situations, certain features are shared between them, particularly in connection with kinship links and questions of body and health. Focusing on the cases of two women in particular, we investigate how the mechanisms of stigmatization are constructed.

Séverine Gojard

Mots-clés: Grossesse - Maternité - Femmes aveugles - Déficience visuelle - Compétences maternelles

The building up of mothering skill s for blind mothers-to-be in the Paris area
Families of blind mothers-to-be usually express some sort of fear, whether founded or not, concerning the transmission of blindness through childbirth. Furthermore, these families more or less explicitly assume that blind mothers-to-be will demonstrate incompetence in terms of mothering skills because of the presumed difficulty of transmitting savoir-faire concerning infants to such women. Professional workers in the field of health and social services also share similar fears and assumptions. Institutionalized measures aimed at helping these women gain the necessary motherly competences do exist, however. From a broader perspective, though, neighbours and media often dramatize such cases. The women concerned demand that their situation be considered as quite normal and that the differences they experience be regarded as trivial. It should be underlined that one of the reasons why families and professionals react the way they do to such pregnancies is due to the social status (marital or professional) of these women rather than to the actual attributes of the handicap itself.

Christine Gruson

Mots-clés: Handicap mental - Déficience intellectuelle - Parentalité - Expérience de maternité

Motherhood and mental handicap. The paradoxical view of the professionals
In France, nowadays, it is becoming more and more common for mentally handicapped women to experience motherhood. Little research has been carried out on this subject in comparison with other countries, however. Movements fighting for social integration consider such women to have the same rights as other people, including the right to be a parent. However, the discourse of social workers on this topic questions the capacity of intellectually deficient women to fulfil the maternal ideal, creating a situation in which these women are subject to paradoxical expectations: as physiological mothers, they are by definition (according to the prevalent «social-action model»), good mothers; and yet as a mentally handicapped mothers they are considered to be mothers facing difficulties. This article explores the complex dynamics of this situation by examining the case of a woman having to deal with the prejudices of the professionals handling her case.

Fernanda Bittencourt Ribeiro

Mots-clés: Grossesse - Accouchement - Situation de détresse - Enfants placés - Familles monoparentales

«Faire l'île d'Yeu»: the limbo of parenthood
This article is based on ethnographic data collected during a two-year period of research carried out at a centre providing services for single-parent families on the island of Yeu in France. Starting from questions concerning how pregnancy and child-delivery in precarious conditions can throw light on the symbolic construction of motherhood and on the social relations that follow on from the situation of being a single-parent, the analysis identifies three different situations observed during the fieldwork: that of women who were mothers already and who became pregnant again when they arrived at this child-placement centre; that of women who got pregnant during their stay on the island; and, finally, that of women who got pregnant again immediately after they had gone back to the mainland with their family.

Julia Pauli

Schlüsselwörter: Verwandtschaft - Migration - Gender - Mexiko

Twelve-month pregnancies: international mi gration, reproductive conflicts and female autonomy in a comm unity in central Mexico
This article describes how the perceptions and lived experiences of pregnancy in a rural Mexican community are changing due to the increased involvement of the male population in illegal labour migration to the USA. To provide a theoretical background for the discussion, an outline of the Mesoamerican household system and its complementary gender ideologies is given. The three cases then described highlight aspects of continuity and change within this productive, reproductive and ideological context. The migration and long-term absence of the husband can further reduce the already low level of reproductive and productive autonomy experienced by pregnant, patrivirilocally residing women. As the first pregnancy demonstrates, female affinal kin, especially the mother-in-law, play a crucial role in this respect. The second case study focuses on the increasingly common transgressions of women within the productive, reproductive and normative spheres. A third type of pregnancy demonstrates the relevance of a more general type of autonomy for women's reproductive health and well-being.

Deborah Blizzard

Keywords: Pregnancy loss - Personhood - Twinning - Fetoscopy

This article explores the rare fetal condition, acardiac twinning, within the cultural context of loss. Acardiac twins are identical twins in which one twin develops with normal physiological characteristics while the co-twin, or «acardius», develops severe malformations rendering it incompatible with life ex utero. In many cases this condition, left untreated, leads to the demise of the otherwise healthy twin. To treat this condition some women undergo in utero fetal surgery, or «fetoscopy», to ligate the acardius from the placenta, thus improving the survival rate of the co-twin. Here I explore the variations in meanings associated with the acardius and demonstrate how women carrying these pregnancies vacillate between objectifying and subjectifying this entity. These vacillations suggest that the acardius challenges notions of personhood and humanness which are often thought of as existing along a spectrum. By recognizing this varying meaning within an amalgamation framework women and their caregivers may be better prepared to face these extraordinary pregnancies.

Didier Lett

Mots-clés: Moyen âge - Grossesses - Mère - Père

Extraordinary and ordinary pregnancies from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century
By examining medieval history we can see how relative the ideas of normal pregnancy and extraordinary pregnancy are. In the Middle Ages even a «normal» pregnancy was always very dangerous for the mother and for the baby, a situation which seems extraordinary to us today. This short contribution offers a reflection on how extraordinary pregnancies are conceived of in terms of Christian beliefs and tries to show that even «normal pregnancies» always represented a time of danger and over-protection for pregnant women. It also talks about the behaviour of fathers, the other actors in the pregnancy scenario, who are often forgotten or ignored in studies about pregnant women.