Author Type

Graduate Student

Date of Award

Summer 7-8-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Status

Version of Record

Submission Date

August 2026

Department

Anthropology

College Granting Degree

Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

Department Granting Degree

Anthropology

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]

Katharina Rynkiewich

Abstract

This thesis examines how structural inequality shapes the experience of perinatal care among pregnant individuals and healthcare providers in South Florida, with particular attention to how risk is perceived and communicated, how trust between patients and providers is built or eroded, and how medical decision-making unfolds under conditions of structural vulnerability. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted between October 2025 and April 2026, supplemented by a quantitative analysis of low-birth-weight rates across all 67 Florida counties, the project analyzes how risk is defined, communicated, and lived across community-based prenatal organizations, online educational platforms, and in-depth provider and patient interviews. The research argues that perinatal risk in this region is not simply a biomedical category, but a socially produced condition shaped by immigration enforcement, economic precarity, and uneven access to institutional support. South Florida, with its demographic diversity and pronounced disparities in maternal health outcomes, provides a critical regional lens into dynamics that operate across the United States. Black infants in Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade counties are born preterm at rates approaching twice those of white infants, a pattern that reflects not individual clinical failure but the structural conditions surrounding pregnancy. Trust in clinical care and the capacity to make meaningful medical decisions are distributed unevenly across these structural lines. By situating lived experiences of perinatal care within frameworks of structural violence, authoritative knowledge, and biopolitical governance, this thesis contributes to anthropological discussions of reproductive health and stratified reproduction while illuminating how perinatal life in South Florida is shaped long before the baby is born.

Download

Included in

Anthropology Commons

Share

COinS