The “Asian Mother and Baby Campaign”: Race, Healthcare, and Citizenship in late Twentieth-Century Britain

This article examines how efforts to improve maternal and perinatal health among Britain’s South Asian population served to uphold medical hierarchies and construct post-imperial racial formations. It uses the “Asian Mother and Baby Campaign” (AMBC) to assess state responses to health inequity. The AMBC was set up in 1984 by the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS) in conjunction with the Save the Children Fund (SCF). By using the Department of Health and SCF archives, as well as original oral history interviews, this article shows that while the AMBC was designed to make healthcare more accessible, its attempt to “medically integrate” South Asian women helped to pathologize them and place them under medical surveillance. As the testimonies of healthcare professionals, users of the campaign, and women’s health activists show, the AMBC’s vision for healthcare reform was tied to racialized and class-based discourses around citizenship and belonging. This article thus interrogates what campaigns like the AMBC tell us about healthcare spaces and how they recalibrated imperial racial formations in order to manage and maintain racial difference in Britain. It argues that the AMBC created knowledge systems that were oftentimes at odds with community-based expertise. The campaign ultimately shaped South Asian women’s experiences of maternity care, as well as the national dialogue on race and notions of welfare state inclusivity. By focusing on British South Asian women’s healthcare in this way, this article makes a critical contribution to scholarship on race, health citizenship, and the limitations of multicultural ideals in late twentieth-century Britain.