Planning parenthood: Health care providers' perspectives on pregnancy intention, readiness, and family planning

A major health care goal in the United States is increasing the proportion of pregnancies that are planned. While many studies examine family planning from the perspective of individual women or couples, few investigate the perceptions and practices of health care providers, who are gatekeepers to medicalized fertility control. In this paper, I draw on 24 in-depth interviews with providers to investigate how they interpret and enact the objective to “plan parenthood” and analyze their perspectives in the context of broader discourses about reproduction, family planning, and motherhood. Interviews reveal two central discourses: one defines pregnancy planning as an individual choice, that is as patients setting their own pregnancy intentions; the second incorporates normative expectations about what it means to be ready to have a baby that exclude poor, single, and young women. In the latter discourse, planning is a broader process of achieving middle-class life markers like a long-term relationship, a good job, and financial stability, before having children. Especially illuminating are cases where a patient's pregnancy intention and the normative expectations of “readiness” do not align. With these, I demonstrate that providers may prioritize normative notions of readiness over a patient's own intentions. I argue that these negotiations of intention and readiness reflect broader tensions in family planning and demonstrate that at times the seemingly neutral notion of “planned parenthood” can mask a source of stratification in reproductive health care.