Paper
It is (not) about you: Ethnographic and narrative approach to adolescent pregnancy through teenager’s voices and silences.
presenters
Bianca Vargas
Nationality: Mexico
Residence: Mexico
National Autonomous University of Mexico
Presence:Online
Keywords:
adolescent pregnancy, autonomy, sexual and reproductive rights, healthcare
Abstract:
Social disparities are often intertwined with linguistic inequalities. Therefore, the lack of fluency in a dominant language entails prejudice, asymmetrical relations, and limited agency (Briggs & Mantini-Briggs, 2016). Speaking about adolescents seeking for obstetric healthcare during pregnancy, there are many communicative gaps to face, on one hand the encounter with the medical culture and their specialized terms, which they share with the rest of the ‘patients’, and the adult-centered language and codes, that emphasizes a specific form of inequality related to age and generation. Hence, adolescent pregnancy remains as a social and public health problem addressed by many countries and global policies, with little participation of teenagers and young population.
During a sixteen-months fieldwork I conducted my doctoral research in a maternal and newborn healthcare public facility in Mexico City, where I approached pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum healthcare for adolescents through a methodological strategy centered on dialogic and interactive observation, as well as the accompaniment of ten adolescents during the process of care. This close interaction with adolescents from 12 to 19 years, led to the emergence of complex narratives about their lives, context, and sexual and reproductive trajectories.
Nevertheless, the body and its processes might be a big silence in adolescents’ language, not only because of the lack of knowledge, but of the incipient awareness about what it represents (Allen, 2005). So, for they to experience autonomy and self-understanding it is necessary that their needs, sensations, and feelings are expressed in their own terms. These narratives the respect of silences stood out for enabling teenagers to recognize their bodies and its sudden transformations, to make some sense about their experience with relationships, sexuality, and the fact of becoming mothers, and to speak about different expressions of vulnerability and violence.