Intersectional Identities In Carleen's First Pregnancy

I assumed that most women are thrilled to experience pregnancy and to have a child. But, the reality is most women are terrified. Pregnancy is scary. Women don't know what is happening to their bodies. Every pregnancy is different so, women don't know what's normal or not. Another reason could be they aren't or allowed to be happy to be pregnant. A woman might realize that they are not as prepared as they thought they were. They might begin to question if they can handle the responsibility of taking care of another person or if they are making a mistake. The sad truth is they might be. Or, people will lecture a woman for being stupid and not being safe. This is most common with women who are too young or not married.

I have recently interviewed my grandmother Mindy. I chose to interview my grandmother because we have a close relationship and I look up to her and love spending every second with her and couldn’t think of a better person to interview than her. The reason for this interview is to get an insight of how her pregnancy coming from her. In this interview I will learn all about her pregnancy, from the beginning to the end. Mindy is my grandmother because she is my mothers mother. Mindy has spent most of her life in Kenya, and now resides now in America.

Each week women gather at Christian Chapel, a church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to meet with mentors to discuss what they endured that week. There are several different care groups. The most attended groups are the parenting and birth mothers groups. I decided to sit in at a birth mothers group, which was uncomfortable for me. This care group is held for birth mothers who have gave their child or children up for adoption. Some of the birth mothers experience open adoption, meaning they have some form of communication with their birth children. Although some birth mothers obtain closed adoptions, where they have no communication with their birth children.

What a majority of research has found about the role of a parent is that it is extremely stressful. (13) found that a lot of stressors came before even becoming a parent. The idea and roles of being a parent was enough to add stress too expecting parents. For women the biggest stressor was the role itself of becoming a new mother and for both men and women the social and gender expectations placed upon them also caused stress (13). Not only is the idea of becoming a parent stressful but the added stress of societal norms plays a huge factor in the way parents approach and feel about parenthood. (16) also attributes parental stress to the birth story. Dependent upon the parent’s birth plan and what they expect to happen during delivery and what actually

The parent interviewed is middle aged mother of two, which both are in their late twenties. She informed me that prior to having children she thought that she would never experience the joy of motherhood. Mrs. Digat married young at seventeen years of age and longed to have a family of her own. Unfortunately, pregnancy did not come easily. She saw countless doctors and underwent numerous procedures in effort to become a mother. There was nothing she wanted more out of life that to have her own little bundle of joy. Many years came and went without a baby that she so desired; Mother’s Day was especially difficult to endure. Then, unexpectedly after thirteen years of trying she became pregnant. This was the beginning of a

The recruiting phase of the study proved to be quite challenging. Initially the researcher recruited couples that were childless. As a result, there was reluctance in terms of participants coming forward to take part in the study. The first couple, who, participated in the study consisted of a wife who wanted to share her story and a husband who supported her. After completing the individual interviews, the couple declined to participate in the joint interview. The couple struggled with being childless and although they found ways to compensate via careers, education and caretaking of others, the disappointment with being unable to parent was profound. The wife expressed such strong emotions and shared that discussing her infertility was a deep and powerful experience for her. Through this interview, the researcher began to understand the emotional intensity of this topic. It was an insightful and enriching interview experience.

Her first statement was that we all have one thing in life that we always wanted to do but found that we did not actually have the chance or the guts to do it. She has seen others do it and wonder if it would be possible for her to do. She missed the transition from

Janet Jacobs and Stefanie Mollborn wrote the article titled Early Motherhood and the Disruption in Significant Attachments based off of their studies of 48 teenage mothers to gain a better understanding of the hardships African American and Latina girls face when they become pregnant at a young age. This research analyzes the loss or damage of their different connections and relationships between the young mothers’ family members and friends, but the most important losses being between the teen mother and their immediate family, like their own mothers or siblings. Through these teen mothers’ life accounts, this article investigates the isolating impacts of young motherhood within their social lives and how it throws them into a life of sudden

Cultural differences are also an important aspect of the critical incident as mother was from a Pakistan and had recently moved to England. Emma was from Pakistan has had only been in the country for a year and was finding it difficult to adjust and integrate into her community.. According to research migrant women experience feelings of great sadness, vulnerability, loneliness, isolation and wishing for family members to be around during the perinatal period (Drennan and Joseph, 2005). Emma did not know about the services available in the community such as children centres and sure start for support and had to be sign posted by the health visitor to these services. Gender and ethnicity are important factors which influence the vulnerability of a person. As a woman from Pakistan origin, motherhood signifies your importance and value in the society. Barns and Maple (1992) show how women hope that motherhood can give them identity and value as women.

For this interview project paper, I chose childbirth as my topic because it is related to the field that I want to pursue in my future career and I wanted to explore more about it. Having said that, I was given an opportunity to create my own questions that were correlated with childbirth and its relations to the domains of human development. I had the opportunity to interview a woman in her early adulthood, who recently gave birth to their second child here in Rockville, Maryland. After one hour of interviewing her over the phone, I was able to developed my thesis, introduction, supporting details, and conclusion for my paper based on my interviewee’s responses and experience about childbirth.

A study by Fragile Families shows that out of 5,000 children born in the U.S. Fifty-five percent of the birth mothers or fathers had at least one new romantic relationship before the child turned five, and most of these mothers had two or more new romantic relationships. Nearly 80 percent of the children experienced family instability, family complexity, or both by their fifth birthday (Haskins). It’s not just the parents that suffer when having unplanned pregnancies the children do too. It’s an issue that can

The objective of this paper is to look at the trauma that young girls experience when faced with an unplanned pregnancy. Not only does pregnancy physically take a toll on a woman’s body, but also being pregnant under the age of 19 with a shaken view of the future can significantly heighten depression, anxiety, and stress for the mother and the baby. This paper aims to highlight the effects of these types of trauma within pregnancy, the most effective forms of treatment, and the influences that these types of trauma would have on the pregnancy itself without the intervention that will later be discussed in depth. The cycle of young motherhood that is often passed from generation to generation will be looked at along with the effects of unplanned pregnancy on the child’s life. A case study describing a 19-year-old girl facing an unplanned pregnancy will help provide a picture for treatment and therapy. Keywords: unplanned pregnancy, trauma in-utero, maternal depression.

Among social scientists pregnancy and childbirth has been discussed and viewed as a “socially constructed experience” rather than a physiological phenomenon (Rothman, 1977; Sutherland & Bay, 1997, pg. 7). Sutherland & Bay (1997) argued that contemporary approaches that rely mainly on medical and psychological models on the study of pregnancy, fail to locate the social relations of women’s experiences of pregnancy as socially constructed, and interpreted from the standpoint of her everyday live. From a feminist standpoint, it is argued that the worldview conceptualisation of pregnancy as the realization of motherhood and the epitome of femininity does not represent women’s true conception of the experience of pregnancy (Sutherland & Bay, 1997). In addition, the focus around childbirth within the perspective of a sociologists is on the interpretations which a woman construct around childbirth rather than the physiological process itself (Rothman, 1977). These interpretations go on to influence her behaviours and interactions, and consequently impact on the way the woman understand, define and construct her birth experience (Rothman, 1977; Sutherland & Bay, 1997).

In many conditions the mother faces depression when told she is pregnant which can lead to abortion. During a study performed by the Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology, it was found that “40–45% of women experience high levels of anxiety between the diagnosis of pregnancy” (263). In addition to feeling anxiety when they are pronounced pregnant, many continue to have emotional distress. Canário, Figueiredo and Ricou found “20% of women are reported to experience high levels of depression” during the pregnancy or after the pregnancy has been terminated (263). Depression and anxiety have many consequences for the body of an expectant mother and the potential child. This depression can last for longer than a few months after the mother

In many parts of the world as well in the United States, many women continue to feel pressured in having children due to societal, cultural, and religious beliefs, but are experiencing cultural barriers in seeking out reproductive health care services in addition to lacking access to health care services. The lack of access to health care and cultural barriers has resulted in women experiencing reproductive health problems and health disparities in the United States. In many cultures, the role of a woman is childbearing and motherhood and some women may feel inadequate and worthless if they have not produced a child. Others simply may not have access or have religious barriers in obtaining contraceptives to prevent unwanted pregnancies. These issues and beliefs are evident among the Latino, African, and Middle Eastern cultures and religions, and it is having a negative health impact on the women and is producing poor health care outcomes.