Understanding Reproductive Loss

Perspectives on Life, Death and Fertility

Carol Komaromy, Sarah Earle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409428107
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317004684
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The study of human reproduction has focused on reproductive 'success' and on the struggle to achieve this, rather than on the much more common experience of 'failure', or reproductive loss. Drawing on the latest research from The UK and Europe, The United States, Australia and Africa, this volume examines the experience of reproductive loss in its widest sense to include termination of pregnancy, miscarriage, stillbirth, perinatal and infant death, as well as - more broadly - the loss of desired normative experiences such as that associated with infertility, assisted reproduction and the medicalisation of 'high risk' pregnancy and birth. Exploring the commonalities, as well as issues of difference and diversity, Understanding Reproductive Loss presents international work from a variety of multi-disciplinary perspectives and will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists and other social scientists with interests in medicine, health, the body, death studies and gender.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• An Introduction to Understanding Reproductive Loss
• 1 ‘Infertility’ and ‘Involuntary Childlessness’: Losses, Ambivalences and Resolutions
• 2 International Perspectives on the Sterilization of Women with Intellectual Disabilities
• 3 The Social Shaping of Fertility Loss Due to Cancer Treatment: A Comparative Perspective
• 4 Reconstructing Childbirth Expectations after Pre-eclampsia
• 5 Diabetes and the Pregnancy Paradox: The Loss of Expectations and Reproductive Futures
• 6 ‘Silent’ Miscarriage and Deafening Heteronormativity: A British Experiential and Critical Feminist Account
• 7 Surrogate Losses: Failed Conception and Pregnancy Loss Among American Surrogate Mothers
• 8 Focusing on Force and Forms in Cameroon: Reproductive Loss Reconsidered
• 9 Bereaved Parents: A Contradiction in Terms?
• 10 ‘Troubling the Normal’: ‘Angel Babies’ and the Canny/Uncanny Nexus
• 11 Baby Gardens: A Privilege or Predicament?
• 12 The Memorialization of Stillbirth in the Internet Age
• 13 ‘As If She Never Existed’: Changing Understandings of Perinatal Loss in Australia in the Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Century
• 14 Hiding Babies: How Birth Professionals Make Sense of Death and Grief
• 15 Managing Emotions at the Time of Stillbirth and Neonatal Death
• 16 Experiences of Reproductive Loss: The Importance of Professional Discretion in Caring for a Patient Group with Diverse Views
• Index