Wombs at risk, wombs as risk: Fat women’s experiences of reproductive care

Using the Foucaultian concepts of biopower and biocitizenship, critical scholars of childhood “obesity” have shown how fat mothers are labeled as “risks” not only to their children, but also to the State. Such discourses are salient even for fat women who have yet to birth children, as fat women’s “poor utero environments” are now imagined as “at-risk” spaces for babies particularly by the medical community. Critical theorists are only beginning to trace how such discourses of in-utero risk impact fat women who are attempting to conceive and who are pregnant. The authors add to this nascent scholarship by relating the results of a Canadian study exploring the weight-related healthcare experiences of fat women accessing reproductive healthcare while attempting to conceive, while pregnant, or while giving birth. Participants described how fetal risk was ubiquitously emphasized by healthcare professionals who continuously communicated fat women’s unfitness as mothers. At the extreme, participants described experiences resonating with so-called “hard” eugenic practices, wherein participants were routinely denied certain procedures that would have allowed them to attempt conception, including the removal of birth control devices. The authors suggest, then, that current medical biopolitics of “maternal obesity” are one inflection of a “new eugenics” that not only produces and manipulates life, but also prevents it all together.