Wendy Simonds

Emergency contraception and morality: reflections of health care workers and clients.

In this study, we explore the retrospective reports of 21 US Planned Parenthood clients about their use of emergency contraception pills (ECPs) and the views of ten Planned Parenthood health care workers at two clinics about providing ECPs. We elucidate the sociological phenomena that frame emergency contraception usage: cultural ideology about contraception, sexuality, unintended pregnancy, and abortion. We focus on the ways in which interactions between health care workers and clients both mediate and reinforce such cultural ideology. Our research indicates that the distinctions between fertilization and pregnancy, between contraception and abortion, between responsible and irresponsible procreative behavior, are not hard and fast boundaries upon which everyone agrees. We illuminate the dividing lines and continuities our participants invoked, affirmed, and questioned when contemplating the continuum from potential fertility to realized (and unwanted) pregnancy.

Consuming contraceptive control: gendered distinctions in web-based contraceptive advertising.

There are over a hundred contraceptives currently on the market in the USA. In this paper, we present a discourse analysis of the stand-alone websites for 43 contraceptives in an effort to understand what contraceptive manufacturers are selling consumers along with their products. Manufacturers tailor marketing messages to promote conventional sex and gender norms using a scientific discourse. In particular, these products appropriate feminist ideals about independence and bodily integrity and promise consumers control and choice over procreation and sexual health, while existing within a larger context of medical surveillance in a patriarchal and capitalist culture.

CONFESSIONS OF LOSS: Maternal Grief in True Story, 1920- 1985

This article analyzes articles appearing in True Story from 1920 to 1985 that concern womens grief after pregnancy and child loss. They are discussed as a historical link between nineteenth-century consolation literature and current psychological and academic discussions of grief. True Story is a confession magazine marketed for working-class women, whose reproductive losses have generally been minimized or ignored by previous literary and current professional and journalistic treatments of maternal grief. Articles are examined within the constructs of confession literature and within the larger context of womens popular literature. Like working-class womens experiences of reproductive loss, these areas have been largely overlooked, dismissed, or denigrated by literary scholars and sociologists. The moral tone of True Story gives womens first-person narratives about infant death and pregnancy an ambiguous prescriptive quality, in that both self-empowerment and self-blame are recommended. True Story reinforces traditional notions of motherhood and femininity, but subtly challenges patriarchal class relations in American society.

Providers, Pills and Power: The US Mifepristone Abortion Trials and Caregivers’ Interpretations of Clinical Power Dynamics

In this article, we examine retrospective accounts of health care workers who participated in the Population Council’s clinical trials of mifepristone (RU-486) between October 1994 and September 1995. We conducted focus group interviews with 78 health care providers at 17 sites around the USA, after the clinical trials of mifepristone (RU-486) were completed. We discuss providers’ reflections upon power dynamics between them and their clients during the clinical trials, as well as the implications of these changes on the future provision of non-surgical abortion. Caregivers tend to see mifepristone users as more ‘empowered’ than women having surgical abortions, and see themselves as losing power over their clients’ abortion experiences. They offer nuanced and ambivalent assessments of the role of empowerment in their clients’ motivations and experiences as mifepristone users. They tend to view the method as responsible for generating more egalitarian clinical interactions (and to endorse it as such), but the variation present in their evaluations demonstrates most clearly the power of caregivers’ interpretative work in shaping clinical interactions. In assessing their experiences with mifepristone, caregivers demonstrate their interpretative work ‘on’ clients, which is enmeshed with their sense of who they are as medical workers.

The Sociology of Architecture: Constructing Identities:

This book begins with the creation of the colony of the Philippines in 1898 and ends with national independence in 1946. However, the book does not center upon either; instead, it focuses on the economic, political, and legal struggles of Filipino immigrants in the United States. The book is organized chronologically, although there is some overlap of periods across chapters. The first chapter deals with the racial politics of empire and the establishment of the Philippines as a colony of the United States. This lays the groundwork for the analysis of the political economy of Filipino immigration (1900s–1920s) in the second chapter. The next chapter deals more specifically with social and legal barriers that Filipinos confronted during the first three decades of the century. Chapter Four is a study of violence directed against Filipinos in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Finally, last two chapters deal with the political negotiations for independence, the participation of Filipinos in the Second World War, and the consequences for immigrants in the United States. The colonization of the Philippines resulted in the creation of a new legal category: the U.S. national, that is, those persons owing allegiance to the United States because they were at the same time citizens of one of its colonies. However ‘‘nationals’’ were not full-fledged citizens of the United States, and this initially led to considerable confusion about their rights to entry and to work. This ambiguous political status set the stage for the immigration of Filipinos who came to work in agri-business, first in Hawaii and then to the western and southwestern states. Later, Filipinos would also find work in service and industrial sectors. The first generation of Filipino immigrants struggled for and soon (in 1906) attained the right, as U.S. nationals, to unlimited entry into the United States. The author skillfully shows how Filipinos were clearly agents, and not merely victims, in this process: they were active in both class struggles, to obtain better wages and conditions, and legal battles, to achieve right of entry into the United States. Even though they gained the right to unrestricted immigration, Filipinos confronted other legal barriers regarding interracial marriage, property rights, and naturalization as U.S. citizens. In addition, local governments also attempted to police the color line by passing laws enforcing social segregation. In general, the legal issues were complicated by two principal factors. First, the laws were not always created with Filipinos in mind and the existing racial categories did not easily apply. Indeed, part of the strategy of Filipinos was to argue that they were outside of the laws that were erected explicitly against Afro-Americans, Mexicans, and ‘‘Asiatics,’’ namely, Chinese and Japanese. Second, the interests of local ‘‘nativists’’ often conflicted with those in agribusiness or the federal government. On the one hand, the nativists sought to preserve white privilege, dominance, and the color line; they opposed Filipino immigration. On the other hand, agricultural enterprises were in favor of Filipino workers, although they also sought ways to divide and conquer them whenever workers organized and pressed for better working conditions. In addition, the federal government was obliged to concede some degree of legal and naturalization rights to Filipinos. In the international sphere, it was not good politics to simply exclude them as ‘‘aliens’’ in U.S. society. Especially interesting is the analysis of the diverse and often contradictory positions of the local nativists in towns, counties, and states, the economic interests of agribusiness in the region, and the laws and policies of the federal government. In addition, the full range of actions and strategies of Filipinos on different fronts is fully explained.