Born in an Unsocial World: An Ethnographic Exploration of American Pregnancy Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic threw American society into distress and disarray beginning in March 2020. Pregnant women and families managed excessive uncertainty and fear as they continued to seek hospital services, worry about visitor restrictions, and miss their families. This thesis gives voice to American women who gave birth during this pandemic. Exploring changes to partner participation in pregnancy rituals, visibility and wellbeing, and community formation and feeling, my work parses the complex, and often conflicting, experiences of American mothers, showing how pregnant people and new mothers navigated this changing, and largely unsocial, pandemic world. Their stories expose many existing inequalities in American society that pre-pandemic, social life obscured. In closing, I wonder how some of these pandemic changes might affect the process of pregnancy going forward and what developments new mothers will embrace as sociality reemerges in a post-pandemic America.