Birthing citizens: pregnant immigrants and the boundaries of belonging
Notice bibliographique
Résumé
The perinatal period – pregnancy, birth, and postpartum – is an ideal time to examine the relationships between migrants, their bodies, and state regulation of rights and privileges. Studies that explore drivers of adverse perinatal health outcomes among migrants have largely failed to link obstetric outcomes to differential legal status resulting in inequitable access to perinatal healthcare. Hence, very little is known about how societal norms and regulatory structures around birthright citizenship affect access to pregnancy-related health care in North America.To understand persistent health inequities experienced by pregnant migrants, I conducted a comparative qualitative case study analysis of how birthright citizenship shapes immigrant perinatal healthcare access in British Columbia (Canada) and California (USA). By applying theoretical frameworks on reproductive citizenship, legal liminality/legal violence, and deservingness to the perinatal period, I extend the sociological discourse on migrant rights to a uniquely gendered and racialized domain. Drawing on archival legislative, administrative, regulatory and court documents, as well as archival media data from the US and Canada, I conducted content analyses to unpack key themes about immigrant incorporation, nodes of inclusion and exclusion, and boundary construction.Canada and the US have significant divergences in terms of healthcare accessibility, immigrant incorporation models, and political leadership. However, in both countries, societal constructs about immigrant reproduction and birthright citizenship, driven by concepts of race, ethnicity, socio-economic status, gender, and culture, question whether immigrants and their native-born children are deserving of full inclusion in society. Both countries have placed significant restrictions on eligibility for citizenship (including birthright citizenship) that privileges whiteness, heteronormativity, and wealth. In both countries, reproductive threat narratives, including pejorative terms like “anchor babies” and “birth tourism”, and negative media coverage of reallocation of resources to racialized and low- income immigrants, were extremely similar and increasingly prevalent. In both California and British Columbia, immigrants most likely to be constructed as undeserving of membership in society are Asian and Latine women. In some cases, fraud narratives are being used to justify revocation of citizenship of newborns. Behaviors considered worthy of inclusion preferentially advantage male immigrants (i.e., migration for work). Both legal and perinatal status impact access to publicly funded care and compound pregnant immigrants’ incomplete inclusion in state membership. This dual liminality is more acutely experienced by pregnant immigrants in the United States compared to Canada because state policies emphasize the rights of the fetus over the rights of the pregnant person.This research demonstrates how birthright citizenship models, legal status, and cultural images of parenthood in North America set the boundaries of membership in a society and consequently shape the incorporation trajectories of immigrant families with racialized and marginalized identities. Certain immigrant groups are socially constructed as vulnerable and therefore deserving social and legal inclusion. This type of inclusion is based on perinatal status and the state’s vested interest in the fetus as a future citizen. However, due to their intersectional identities many pregnant immigrants are socially constructed as people unfairly taking advantage citizenship through their reproductive decisions and therefore cast as deserving of exclusion.
Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.
Comment cette classification a été obtenuedéplier
Prédiction machine sur la base complète
Imitation des enseignantsNi prévalence calibrée, ni vérité terrain. Validation humaine à venir. Le volet Gemma est une étiquette directe du modèle pour chaque travail de la base, lue sur la notice réduite au titre. Le volet Codex est un classifieur appris des 10 348 étiquettes directes de Codex et calibré sur les taux pondérés de l'échantillon; les champs sans appui suffisant ne portent aucun appel Codex. Le mode candidate est l'union des deux volets; le consensus est leur intersection. Ces sorties portent le statut machine_predicted_unvalidated et ne sont pas des étiquettes humaines.
Scores du classifieur distillé par catégorie (deux têtes)
| Catégorie | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Métarecherche | 0,003 | 0,006 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens strict) | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens large) | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Bibliométrie | 0,001 | 0,001 |
| Études des sciences et des technologies | 0,015 | 0,019 |
| Communication savante | 0,006 | 0,003 |
| Science ouverte | 0,001 | 0,007 |
| Intégrité de la recherche | 0,001 | 0,003 |
| Charge utile insuffisante (le modèle a refusé de juger) | 0,003 | 0,000 |
Scores machine (provisoires)
Les deux têtes enseignantes du modèle étudiant, lues sur ce travail. Un score ordonne la base pour la relecture; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie, et le statut de validation accompagne chaque rangée tel quel.
Scores de référence d'un modèle non mature (critères de maturité non atteints, 7 itérations). Un score ordonne; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · tel quel depuis la passe de notation : score_only signifie que le nombre peut ordonner les travaux, et qu'aucune étiquette de catégorie n'en découleClassification
machine, non validéePrédiction automatique; un appel candidat d’une seule source (Gemma direct ou Codex distillé), pas un consensus.
Le détail, modèle par modèle et score par score, se trouve en fin de page sous « Comment cette classification a été obtenue ».