Paper Short Abstract:

Investigating migrant women’s access to midwifery care in Italy and France, focusing on barriers, obstetric racism, and mobility. Midwifery care and anamnesis create space to reimagine care. Through storytelling, women reclaim agency over reproduction, contributing to rewrite dominant narratives.

Paper Abstract:

This paper examines the impact of borders on migrant women’s access to midwifery care between Italy and France in 2024. Based on interviews with migrant users of midwifery services, it explores how structural barriers, obstetric racism, and border regimes shape reproductive experiences. Challenging the Western colonial imagination, which often portrays migrant women as passive subjects, the study highlights their strategies of self-determination and how mobility regimes condition access to maternal care. The border functions as both a physical and discursive mechanism that limits care, reinforcing health disparities. Irregular migration routes increase vulnerability to illness and premature death (Gilmore, 2007). "Necropolitics" (Mbembe, 2003) frames the administrative precarity that defines reproductive experiences, while competing public discourses influence reproductive choices. The midwifery relationship of care and the appropriate use of anamnesis create a space to explore women’s experiences and construct new imaginaries of possible care. Narrative is medicine, and through storytelling, women reclaim agency over their reproductive choices. This research foregrounds migrant women’s embodied experiences, recognizing their bodies as sites of political and cultural contestation (Pesarini, 2023). By integrating storytelling with critical reflections on mobility and health regimes, the study contributes to an "unwriting" of dominant narratives on migration and reproduction. It advocates for transformative midwifery practices and equitable health policies that acknowledge migrant women’s lived realities.