Abstract
Targeted services are recommended to pregnant women/parents in vulnerable positions to support their well-being and improve health outcomes; however, being offered extra services is associated with feelings of fear and anxiety. Adopting an ethnographic approach, we explore what parents fear, how and why they experience fear, and how this shapes their childbearing experience and engagement with Danish maternity care services. We made field observations and conducted interviews with 39 parents in vulnerable positions, who shared multiple, ambiguous, and interrelated fears. Four main themes were constructed: fear of going back to a dark place, of having a negative impact on the baby, of being labeled, and of the consequences of service engagement and being open. We conclude that what parents fear, the intensity of these fears, and what potentially triggers it are contingent on their life story, their care pathways, and the maternity care system.
Keywords
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
