Medical Drift

The case of WIC

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In this work, I examine 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.

I examine 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). I examine 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, I argue 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. I argue 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 won the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) Health Services section graduate student paper award.

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