Feminism and Women’s Control over Their Bodies in a Neoliberal Context: A Closer Look at Pregnant Women on Bed Rest

Feminist self-identification influences women’s voting practices, perceptions of gender discrimination, and views about their bodies. However, there is little information on how feminist self-identification influences women’s experiences of high-risk pregnancy, if at all. The article focuses on women’s identification with feminism within a neoliberal US context to examine how women make sense of and experience the medical prescription of pregnancy bed rest. Each year, medical professionals prescribe pregnancy bed rest for 700,000 to 1 million women in the United States. On the one hand, women’s overwhelming expectation of control over their bodies and reproduction suggests that they cannot easily be divided into feminist and nonfeminist camps; on the other, preliminary findings from a small-scale qualitative study suggest ways in which feminist identification may affect women’s experiences of pregnancy bed rest. Feminists were more likely to be in an egalitarian relationship that facilitated the redistribution of household chores during bed rest.