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Paper short abstract

This paper theorizes reproductive risk as a chronic condition of the present. Identifying temporal technologies within clinical practice that architect a state of permanent anticipation, it examines the social consequences of this regime with the aim of fostering more equitable models of care.

Paper long abstract

The biomedical model frames risk as a statistical probability of a future adverse health outcome. Yet, for pregnant individuals, risk operates less as a future threat than as a present form of suffering, a chronic condition produced by the biomedical management of uncertainty itself. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in clinical and urban settings in Spain, this paper explores how the biomedicalization of reproductive risk produces a temporal regime in which pregnant people inhabit a continuous, pathologized liminal state, and how this regime, in turn, reproduces polarization.

Through routine monitoring and diagnostic thresholds, pregnancy is structured as an ongoing process of evaluation in which health status remains provisional and continuously open to revision. This temporal arrangement places individuals in a prolonged state of ontological ambiguity, where they are neither healthy nor clearly ill. Thus, reproductive care organizes time around permanent anticipation as a gendered norm for reproductive citizenship. These temporal regimes generate polarizing effects by sorting reproductive trajectories into unstable categories of normality and pathology, low and high risk, or responsible and irresponsible motherhood. Such distinctions are deeply socially stratified, shaping decision-making within clinical encounters. In contexts where risk is increasingly framed as structurally unavoidable –linked to environmental exposure, for example– the demand to anticipate and mitigate potential harm becomes particularly burdensome. By conceptualizing reproductive risk as a chronic temporal condition, this paper argues for rethinking reproductive care beyond models of foresight and mastery, showing how risk is produced through the everyday governance of uncertainty, time, and care.