The importance of medicalized Pregnancy, Race, and Poverty in shaping surveillance and control

The case of WIC

In this work, Annie examines how the medicalization of pregnancy, motherhood, and infancy, along with ideas about race and poverty influenced the adoption of medical surveillance and control in social welfare policies. She discusses the implications for privacy rights.

She examines the historical trajectories of two U.S. food assistance programs—one which targets pregnant individuals and young children (WIC) and the other which is generally-targeted (SNAP). She examines the complex ways in which medicalization of the pregnancy, motherhood, and infancy has buffered the program from funding cuts and policies designed to exclude certain groups (e.g non-citizens and incarcerated individuals), while also exposing WIC recipients to unprecedented medical surveillance within food assistance programs.

The first manuscript from this project acknowledges that agricultural politics has played a major role in resisting efforts to limit food that can be purchased via SNAP (formerly Food Stamps) and simultaneously dictating the foods available for purchase with WIC. However, agricultural politics alone is not sufficient in explaining differences in restrictions of food purchasing. Nor does it address why medical surveillance defines many aspects of the WIC program but not the SNAP program. Within the paper, she argues that racialized stereotypes of pregnant and mothering individuals experiencing poverty and medicalization of the pregnant body were key to the adoption of surveillance and control within WIC. She contends that the creation of the WIC program is an example of “medical drift”—a process by which medical surveillance follows medicalized bodies into, formerly, non-medical spaces. The paper is currently under review and won the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) Health Services section graduate student paper award.

A second manuscript in preparation with Clare Daniel, PhD asks whether the logics governing cuts in eligibility during Welfare Reform extended to the WIC program. The paper calls for a more nuanced understanding of how surveillance and medicalization challenge pregnant people’s privacy rights while simultaneously maintaining groups who have been excluded from other social welfare programs.

Annie is working toward a book manuscript that merges the historical examination of WIC with a contemporary documentation of how WIC recipients and WIC employees navigate program components.