Paper short abstract:

This presentation focus on the role of risk policies and collective narratives in the making of biopolitics of reproduction in Portugal.

Paper long abstract:

In the past fifty years, pregnancy has gained a lot of interest in social sciences in correspondence with the surge of the body as systematic category of analysis. The pregnant body seems to become a hyper-body on which simultaneously operate biopolitics, economic forces and social imaginaries, all engaged in the creation of a new, dynamic ethic of reproduction.

This paper proposes a reflection on public health management of pregnancy and its medicalisation in Portugal, focusing on a distinctive, shared narrative collected during my research on lived experiences of pregnancy. It is a discourse that portrays the health history of a country that in fifty years has passed from one of the highest to the lowest infant and maternal mortality rate in the European continent, and one of the lowest in the world nowadays. I argue that, through this collective narrative of success, biopolitics of reproduction find in Portugal a fertile ground where to root and sustain what Davis-Floyd (1993) has called the technocratic model of birth, a ritualized ensemble of obstetrical practices aimed at transforming the birthing woman and socializing the newborn into a society of high technological intervention.