Exploring women’s self-reported health problems in pregnancy in the UK and Norway

Abstract

Women usually conceptualize pregnancy as a normal physiological state. In contrast, formal maternity care provision tends to be focused on pathology and risk. The authors aim to explore the extent to which childbearing women apply a sickness lens to pregnancy. We have therefore examined antenatal problems spontaneously reported by 4,000 UK and Norwegian women who responded to the international social media-based Babies Born Better survey. We coded and classified the free-text comments of the respondents as either complaint or disease. We found striking differences in the rates and types of problems reported by the women. We discuss our findings by applying different perspectives of medicalization and of lay and biomedical knowledge.

Acknowledgements

This paper derives from the Babies Born Better project that was developed as part of the EU-funded COST Action IS0907 and continued in EU COST Action IS1405: BIRTH: “Building Intrapartum Research Through Health—an interdisciplinary whole system approach to understanding and contextualizing physiological labour and birth” (http://www.cost.eu/COST_Actions/isch/IS1405), supported by the COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) Program as part of EU Horizon 2020. The work of all those who contributed to developing and running the Babies Born Better Survey is acknowledged. Details of the project, the Steering Group, and the Country Coordinators can be found here: http://www.babiesbornbetter.org/about/.

Data availability statement

The data that supports the findings of this study is available on request from the corresponding author. The data is not publicly available due to restrictions, e.g., its inclusion of information that may compromise the privacy of research participants.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare they have no conflicts of interests.

Funding

The authors reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.