Abstract
Motherhood is a well-researched yet poorly understood determinant of health. Birthing and raising children impacts physical, mental, social, and spiritual health across the maternal life course. This chapter seeks to unravel and expose often neglected dimensions of motherhood and highlight understandings from social science research to create more diverse and equitable motherhoods. Western discourse purports an able-ist, individualist, rationalist, and dualist agenda upon knowledge and experiences of pregnancy, birthing, and mothering. This is fraught with an ideological imperative of independence and perfection and exacerbated by a health regime that neglects mothers’ complex and multifaceted needs, which is exacerbated for those from diverse backgrounds. This chapter seeks to center the knowledge embedded within diverse contexts that are often considered marginal, including perinatal mental health, Indigenous mothering, and mothering with disabilities. It argues that voiding the neoliberal maternal trajectory of individual responsibility and embracing an ethics of care that take collective responsibility for childrearing will uplift those who need additional resources and take the pressure off motherhood as a performative domain for all mothers.
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Neely, E., Jin, Y., Parton, C., Ware, F. (2023). Motherhood. In: Liamputtong, P. (eds) Handbook of Social Sciences and Global Public Health. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96778-9_101-1
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