Assistant professor of anthropology Brenna McCaffrey

Summary

When abortion is performed via medication rather than a procedure, doctors feel differently about their role in the process

Abstract

After the legalization of abortion in 2018, Ireland needed clinicians to become abortion providers and make this political win a medical reality. Yet Irish doctors had next-to-no training in abortion care, and barriers ranging from stigma to economic pressures in the healthcare system impacted doctors’ desire to volunteer. How did hundreds of Irish doctors make the shift from family doctor to abortion provider? Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2017 and 2020, this article explores the process by which Irish general practitioners became abortion providers, attending to the material impact of medical technologies on that journey. Drawing from medical anthropologists who have examined similar themes of agency, pharmaceuticals, and medico-legal frameworks within the topic of assisted dying, I build on Anita Hannig's idea of “agentive displacement” to frame the productive impact of abortion pills on this transition.

Main research questions 

1. When a country legalizes a previously unavailable and stigmatized medical procedure, how do they get their doctors to opt in to become providers?
2. How is a medical procedure different when it is a pill vs. a procedure?

What was already known?

As of 2020, over 50% of all abortions in the United States used medication, and that number continues to climb. In Ireland after legalization of abortion, estimates indicate over 98% of legal abortions took place in the first 12 weeks, where abortions are always done using pills unless there are medical reasons a patient cannot use them (see HSE, 2022). When medical processes that once required physical interactions now include pills that work with or without a provider's intervention, the roles and perception of responsibility of those involved change. For example, with the introduction of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV prevention, the focus on behavioral interventions (i.e., condom use) shifted to include the role of a medication, distributing the responsibility of “safe-sex” from the individuals to the individual, their provider, and their pills (Thomann, 2018). It required potential PrEP patients to think of themselves as people perpetually “at-risk” due to their behaviors and desires, rather than people who sometimes engage in a behavior that is defined as “risky” (Brisson, 2017). While research on pharmaceuticals and subjectivity have often focused on this impact on patients, I hypothesized that these shifts also affected how medical professionals perceive their role in the provision of care.

Novel methodology 

Ethnographic research and interviews with doctors

Implications for society

Relevant to on-going debates about abortion in the U.S., where medication abortion now makes up over 50% of abortions and where access to these very medications is now under threat.

Implications for research

One silver lining to the threat against medication abortion in the U.S. is that more people are paying attention to it. More research is now being done on the social implications of medical practices, for example, people who access medication outside of the formal healthcare system.

Funding 

NSF 1947249

McCaffrey, Brenna. 2024. The woman is the active agent: General practitioners and the agentive displacement of abortion in Ireland. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 38(2), 193-207.

(2024)

Program Highlights

Also prepares students for graduate studies in linguistics, applied linguistics, educational linguistics, linguistic anthropology, or sociolinguistics.
 

Sample Courses

• Language and Culture
• Linguistic Methods

Linguistics

Why study linguistics at Geneseo?

This minor examines the basic concepts and principles in modern linguistic theory, methods of linguistic analysis, and applications of linguistics to other areas of study. Students gain a solid background for work in any field that requires in-depth understanding about linguistic processes, including language teaching, speech-language pathology and audiology, publishing, translation, interpretation, language policy and planning, language documentation and revitalization, and computer sciences.

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• Introduction to Logic
• Language of Healing
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Contact Info

Jennifer Guzmán, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Program Coordinator
guzman@geneseo.edu
Bailey Hall 150
585-245-5174 

anthropology dept

anthropology faculty

Professor Melanie Medeiros and Associate Professor Jennifer Guzmán.

Summary:

Ethnographic Insights on Latin America and the Caribbean brings together 36 chapters toexamine how communities across Latin America and the Caribbean are addressing the most pressing issues of contemporary life, including resistance against extractive industries, anti-Black racism, migration and transnational families, revitalization of Indigenous languages, art and solidarity in the wake of political violence, resilience in the face of climate change, and recent social movements.

Main research question:

How are contemporary communities across Latin America and the Caribbean addressing historical problems and new challenges?

What the edited collection adds to conversations in the field:

Most of the existing teaching books on the region are single-author textbooks or history books. Ethnographic Insights on Latin America and the Caribbean provides a collection of new scholarship, conducted by anthropologists and other field researchers whose work focuses on contemporary life in specific communities and highlights what people in these communities view as the most pressing problems they are facing today.

Novel methodology:

All of the chapters in this book are based on ethnographic research, which prioritizes long-term engagement and participatory fieldwork with communities on the issues that are important to them.

Medeiros, Melanie A. and Jennifer R. Guzmán (editors). 2023. . University of Toronto Press.

Ethnographic Insights on Latin America and the Caribbean, University of Toronto Press (2023)

Associate Professor Jennifer Guzmán (Image provided)

Summary:

Intercultural health initiatives in Chile aim at improving health for Native/Indigenous people, but the design and implementation of intercultural programs have also resulted in negative consequences.

Abstract:

Starting in the late twentieth century, the idea of “intercultural health” emerged as a global health model promising to improve health outcomes in Indigenous communities. One of the earliest settings where the intercultural health model was adopted and developed in Latin America was Gulumapu, the traditional territory of the Mapuche nation that lies west of the Andes Mountains in the nation-state of Chile. This chapter offers a case study of Chilean state-subsidized intercultural health and explores both achievements and limitations of the intercultural health model. I argue that a particular imagined problem of cross-cultural miscommunication is foundational in definitions of the intercultural health approach and in the range of programming that has been developed under the model. In fact, three of the cornerstone interventions that characterize intercultural health programming are in place to facilitate better communication between Indigenous patients and non-Indigenous healthcare professionals. I provide analysis of these three interventions, highlighting ways that they simultaneously promote and undermine health equity and health/communicative justice for Mapuche people and communities.

Research questions:

1. How has intercultural health been defined as a public health goal? 
2. What programming has been developed in the interest of advancing intercultural health? 
3. What intercultural health initiatives been implemented in clinical settings? 
4. What are the aims of these initiatives? 
5. How effective have these initiatives been in achieving these aims?

What the research builds on:

In part as a result of growing awareness about and concern for multiculturalism in medicine, public health policy makers began designing and implementing intercultural (sometimes referred to as cross-cultural) health programs across Latin America during the 1990s and early 2000s. Much of the research on these programs has been program assessment, aimed at generating practical findings that can assist in improving existing programs. Other scholarship has focused on illuminating the ways that these programs fit with broader schemes of neoliberalization or the ways that they fail to address concerns that Native/Indigenous communities raise about public healthcare.

What the research add to the discussion:

Guzmán, Jennifer R. 2024. ." In Riley, Kathleen C., Bernard C. Perley, and Inmaculada M. García-Sánchez (editors). Language and Social Justice: Global Perspectives. New York: Bloomsbury Press.

"Intercultural Health and Communicative Justice in Native Chile," in Language and Social Justice: Global Perspectives (2024)