The impact of technology on pregnancy and childbirth: creating and managing obstetrical risk in different cultural and socio-economic contexts

This special issue brings together empirical studies conducted in eight different countries: Brasil, Turkey, China, Japan, Italy, Senegal, Jordan, and Switzerland. Two papers focus on pregnancy surveillance and related technologies while four others tackle the birthing processes in high-technology as well as low-technology settings. The contribution of the collected papers to the existing literature on pregnancy and childbirth risks is threefold. First, the special issue puts the materiality of hospital birth environments at the centre of the analysis, by paying systematic attention to the ways different technologies and products have shaped the biomedical model(s) of birth that become diffused around the world. Second, the collected papers provide empirical findings not only from the 'developed world' but also from the 'emerging' or 'developing' economies, with the aim of analyzing the various forms of attachment to technologyand to its capacity to remediate risks-in distinct birth cultures and geographies. Finally, this special issue is composed of studies that pay special attention to the heterogeneous and even sometimes discriminatory forms of care targeting distinct categories of users, such as low SES or working class women, immigrant women or women of advanced maternal age. This special issue thus aims to address what has increasingly been criticized as a western-world-centered or privileged-women-centered literature on childbirth risks. The contributions also provide original evidence on the necessity for considering the role played by technological settings in not only the mitigation of childbirth risks but also their conceptualization, recognition, prioritization and, in some cases, their creation.