More Than a Physical Burden: Women’s Mental and Emotional Work in Preventing Pregnancy

Abstract

In the United States, responsibility for preventing pregnancy in heterosexual relationships disproportionately falls on women. While the biotechnological landscape of available methods may explain the assignment of the physical burden for contraception to women, this does not mean the concomitant time, attention, and stress that preventing pregnancy requires must also be primarily assumed by women. Building on work identifying health care providers as contributors to the construction of normative ideas about reproduction, this study analyzed 52 contraceptive counseling visits with women who reported they did not want future children for the construction of responsibility for the mental and emotional aspects of contraception. Offering a case of how gender inequality is (re)produced through clinical encounters, findings demonstrate that clinicians discursively constructed these responsibilities as women’s and point to structural aspects of the visit itself that reify this unequal burden as normal. Results are consistent with research identifying the broader feminization of family health work in heterosexual relationships. To the extent that the distribution of the mental and emotional responsibilities of preventing pregnancy is both a product of and contributor to gender inequality, this analysis yields insight into the production—and possible deconstruction—of (reproductive) health care as a gendered social structure.

Funding and Acknowledgments

I would like to express my deep gratitude to Christine Dehlendorf for sharing these data and to Shari Dworkin, Antonia Biggs, Krystale Littlejohn, Lindsay Stevens, and Diana Greene Foster for their comments on early drafts. The data collection was supported by the Society of Family Planning and by a grant (K23HD067197) from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). The content is the responsibility solely of the author and does not necessarily represent the official views of the Society of Family Planning, the NICHD, or the National Institutes of Health.