Marketing Mothering as ‘Crisis’: Professions Saving us from the ‘Danger’ of Becoming Mothers

One of the most efficient routes to profit is using discourse to frighten an entire population, and then selling them the antidote to their fear. Crisis profitability is maximized if crises can be manufactured out of commonplace life events. The medical profession has already discursively recreated childbearing as an epidemic crisis, to be technologically managed to make it ‘safe’. Through critical analysis of psycho-social research, a public health screening tool, and research linking PTSD with birth, the author argues that social science is constructing mothering similarly, characterizing becoming a mother as a pathogenic crisis, demanding medical and sociological surveillance and intervention. Key words: Postpartum, PTSD, maternal psychology, pathologizing