ALCOHOL, HEALTH, AND REPRODUCTION

Abstract

This article analyzes two recent Swedish public health campaigns targeting pregnant women's drinking: A good start, a pamphlet by the Swedish National Institute of Public Health, and Advice about food for you who are pregnant, a brochure by the Swedish National Food Administration. It conceptualizes the public health campaigns as governmental attempts to steer citizens' behavior and behavior-related desires, aspirations, and beliefs toward a certain understanding of normal healthy lifestyle. The public health campaigns are seen as part of larger processes of bio-power. By applying critical discourse analysis, the article, first, asks how drinking during pregnancy is represented in the campaigns as a health risk. Second, it analyses how the pamphlets advise women to take action to restrain from drinking during pregnancy and what kind of knowledge the pamphlets use to legitimate intervening in the women's lifestyles. And finally, it analyses how the pamphlets try to persuade the women to identify with the proposed information and recommendations. The analysis shows that the campaigns construct an intimate partnership between the state and the citizen. By extending the medical public health gaze to reach inside the female body to emphasize how easily fetal development can be disturbed, and by making women's individual lifestyle choices both the cause of and solution to potential damage during fetal development, the pamphlets make mothers solely responsible and culpable for the health status of the fetus. Partners and fathers are practically absent from the campaign pamphlets. Both campaigns bypass the responsibilities of communities and other broad social institutions in preventing drinking during pregnancy. The campaigns, though having many similarities, differ from each other in terms of the kinds of choices they have made in representations, action, and identification.

KEYWORDS:

• public health campaigns
• drinking
• advice to pregnant women
• governmentality studies
• critical discourse analysis

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a grant from Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (FORTE) for the project Women, Health and Substance Use (2007–2013). We want to thank the anonymous reviewers as well as Peter Holley and Rusten Menard for helpful comments.

Additional information

Jukka Törrönen (author to whom correspondence should be addressed), with a PhD in sociology, has a chair as Professor at SoRAD on social alcohol research, Stockholm University. He has had a long-term interest in alcohol research, in theoretical sociology, in qualitative methods, in social semiotics and in discourse analysis. He has used and developed social semiotic and discourse analytical tools in his work that has been focused on (a) disorderly public drinking, (b) young adults’ drinking cultures, (c) women's substance use and (d) changes in the cultural position of drinking.

Kalle Tryggvesson, with a PhD in criminology, holds a position as Associate Professor at the Department of Criminology, Stockholm University. He has had a long-term interest in the study of alcohol policy with a special interest in the construction of boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate drinking. Earlier work has been focused on (a) the role of alcohol in the attribution of blame for violent behavior, (b) the role of alcohol in the construction of a ‘good’ victim, and (c) the political construction of ‘illegal alcohol’.