Residues and remains: Anthropology of practices around pregnancy endings (360G-Wellcome-212731_Z_18_Z)

My research explores the practices around pregnancy endings and their remains, including acts of forgetting and remembering, and asks what do these reveal about the status of foetuses, women and mothers in contemporary England? Pregnancy endings provide opportunities to interrogate anthropological assumptions about the contemporary family, motherhood, personhood and kinship. To analyse this, I will focus on the practices in the aftermath of a pregnancy ending to understand what they reveal about the values afforded to the remains in different contexts (clinic, home, burial site, crematorium, grave site etc) and by different stakeholders. My research will explore how reactions to and practices around pregnancy endings and remains reflect wider cultural trends in the UK, particularly around motherhood as highly moralized and notions of foetal personhood. I ask how does grief (or the absence of it) intersect with the relationship of the materiality of the remains and the woman’s body. I will conduct in-depth, embedded and analytic ethnography at the Rose Hill Clinic, East Oxford and other sites. Key outputs include a monograph, 3-4 journal articles, and materials aimed at women/ couples (i.e. newspaper articles, information video, radio/ television), health professionals and relevant others (i.e funeral providers, support groups).