Birthing citizens: pregnant immigrants and the boundaries of belonging
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".