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Background: Routine ultrasound scanning to determine gestational age and pregnancy location has long been part of pre-abortion assessment in Britain, despite not being legally required or recommended in national clinical guidelines. To support implementation of fully telemedical abortion care (implemented in Britain in April 2020), the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) issued clinical guidance for an 'as-indicated' approach to pre-abortion ultrasound, removing the need for a clinic visit. We aimed to understand patient experiences of ultrasound in abortion care by conducting a qualitative study with individuals who had abortions with and without an ultrasound scan. Methods: Between November 2021 and July 2022, we recruited patients who had a medical abortion at home without a pre-procedure ultrasound at 69 days' gestation or less at British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), and also had at least one other abortion with an ultrasound from any provider in Britain. We conducted interviews using a semi-structured interview guide to explore our participants' experiences and conducted reflexive thematic analysis. Results: We recruited 24 participants and included 19 interviews in our analysis. We developed three themes from our data. These were 'Ultrasound scans and their relationship with autonomy and decision-making', 'Intrusive and out of place: the ultrasound as an inappropriate technology' and 'Towards preference-centred, quality care'. Conclusions: Further research and user-testing of strategies to improve the scan experience should be undertaken. Patient testimonies on the negative impact of ultrasound scans in abortion care should reassure providers that omitting them according to patient preference is a positive step towards providing patient-centred care.

(from the Executive Summary): Reproductive coercion and abuse (RCA) occurs when power and control is exercised over the autonomous pregnancy decision-making of another. Interpersonal RCA occurs between individuals, when someone seeks to reduce another’s individual autonomy over reproductive decision-making through coercive or controlling behaviour, deception, manipulation, threats, violence, or other forms of abuse. This includes regulating everyday behaviour in relation to the prevention or promotion of pregnancy, and/or access to reproductive healthcare services. RCA can also be institutionalised through laws, regulation, policy or practices when control is exerted on a non-clinical basis. Institutional RCA involves targeting groups or individuals to accept specific reproductive healthcare interventions, withholding them, or making access to other services dependant on their use. This research aimed to investigate policy and practice in abortion, contraception, and maternity care across the UK, undertaking qualitative research with healthcare professionals and experts in interpersonal violence, and it focuses on the safeguarding needs of those at risk of pregnancy.

In the UK, the vast majority of people accept abortion, whether or not they are religious. Holding an absolutist anti-abortion view is out of line with the general population. The overwhelming majority of anti-abortion activists are motivated by conservative Christian religious beliefs, not necessarily shared by others in their faith communities. Their minority position, and ageing population, poses issues for the continuance of the anti-abortion movement, creating a need for specific anti-abortion religious socialisation that is unavailable elsewhere. Drawing on data from a longitudinal ethnographic study of anti-abortion activism, this article highlights the ways in which anti-abortion activists seek to develop anti-abortion values among primary-aged children. It illustrates their conflict between the need to develop a strong anti-abortion identity and involving children in potentially controversial discussions on abortion. We use the framework of lived religion to argue that, while much attention has been given to the concerns about children in minority religions, this has resulted in a lack of attention to the diversity of practices within mainstream religious communities, and how controversial forms of socialisation are managed.

The United Nations view access to abortion as a fundamental human right. Yet increasingly in the UK, religiously-motivated activists undertake public displays opposing abortion, often outside abortion clinics, and precipitated through international campaigns like 40 Days for Life (Lowe and Page forthcoming). Activists see their actions as an essential intervention; some explicitly frame this as a form of help. But examining this from the perspective of how bodies are gendered and regulated in the public sphere raises questions regarding whether this is a form of harassment, and therefore gendered violence. This article is based on a UK ethnography. Using Kelly’s (1988) continuum of violence thesis, we examine whether this activism constitutes gendered violence, examining two different activities – prayer and graphic images. Despite these activities being distinct and contrasting, we argue that both should be understood as part of a continuum of violence, causing harm to those seeking abortion services.

There is a long history of regarding marginalised groups as unfit to parent and of eugenic policies targeting those with ‘undesirable’ bodily conditions or behaviours. This is part of a broader pattern of stratified reproduction – structural conditions that enable or discourage certain groups from reproducing – that often brings about and exacerbates injustices. This paper critically assesses the US and UK social and medical literature on applying pressure to marginalised groups, or those who have behaved ‘irresponsibly’, to use long-acting reversible contraception (LARC). Targeting young people for LARC fails to recognise that social inequality is the context for teenage pregnancy, not the result of it. Provider pressure on women of colour to use LARC is linked to institutional racism, whilst policy for those with physical and intellectual disabilities is shaped by disability discrimination. Other groups to be targeted include so-called ‘welfare mothers’, substance users, those who have had children put into care and offenders. Particularly controversial are cases in which LARC has been ordered by courts. LARC policy incorporating these kind of discriminatory practices needs to stop; future policy should focus on person-centred care that bolsters reproductive justice.

In the UK, narratives about saved women and babies have been a significant feature in anti-abortion campaigns to oppose bufferzones, which seek to prevent anti-abortion activists from being directly outside abortion clinics. Anti-abortion activists argue that without their presence, the ‘abortion industry’ will fail to seek ‘informed’ consent and coerce women into abortions. These presumptions are based on positioning abortion, and service providers, as inherently ‘evil’, whilst saving is rooted in Christian beliefs aimed at ensuring that souls go to heaven. This paper emerges from ethnographic research in Britain on anti-abortion activism and pro-choice counter-demonstrations. Highlighting the importance of saving in many of the anti-abortion campaigns, it will argue that as they have a different conceptualisations of harm to pro-choice activists, this leads to a lack of understanding of each other's saving narrative. Yet to some extent they both draw on a positioning of women as potentially vulnerable and at risk from the actions of others.

In the last decades we have seen a growing interest in research into children's own experiences and understandings of health and illness. This development, we would argue, is much stimulated by the sociology of childhood which has drawn our attention to how children as a social group are placed and perceived within the structure of society, and within inter-generational relations, as well as how children are social agents and co-constructors of their social world. Drawing on this tradition, we here address some cross-cutting themes that we think are important to further the study of child health: situating children within health policy, drawing attention to practices around children's health and well-being and a focus on children as health actors. The paper contributes to a critical analysis of child health policy and notions of child health and normality, pointing to theoretical and empirical research potential for the sociology of children's health and illness., AuthorCount:3

In recent years, English welfare and health policy has started to include pregnancy within the foundation stage of child development. The foetus is also increasingly designated as ‘at risk’ from pregnant women. In this article, we draw on an analysis of a purposive sample of English social and welfare policies and closely related advocacy documents to trace the emergence of neuroscientific claims-making in relation to the family. In this article, we show that a specific deterministic understanding of the developing brain that only has a loose relationship with current scientific evidence is an important component in these changes. We examine the ways in which pregnancy is situated in these debates. In these debates, maternal stress is identified as a risk to the foetus; however, the selective concern with women living in disadvantage undermines biological claims. The policy claim of neurological ‘critical windows’ also seems to be influenced by social concerns. Hence, these emerging concerns over the foetus’ developing brain seem to be situated within the gendered history of policing women’s pregnant bodies rather than acting on new insights from scientific discoveries. By situating these developments within the broader framework of risk consciousness, we can link these changes to wider understandings of the ‘at risk’ child and intensified surveillance over family life.

This article discusses the findings of a study tracing the incorporation of claims about infant brain development into English family policy as part of the longer term development of a ‘parent training’, early intervention agenda. The main focus is on the ways in which the deployment of neuroscientific discourse in family policy creates the basis for a new governmental oversight of parents. We argue that advocacy of ‘early intervention’, in particular that which deploys the authority of ‘the neuroscience’, places parents at the centre of the policy stage but simultaneously demotes and marginalises them. So we ask, what becomes of the parent when politically and culturally, the child is spoken of as infinitely and permanently neurologically vulnerable to parental influence? In particular, the policy focus on parental emotions and their impact on infant brain development indicates that this represents a biologisation of ‘therapeutic’ governance.

In recent years, claims about children's developing brains have become central to the formation of child health and welfare policies in England. While these policies assert that they are based on neuro-scientific discoveries, their relationship to neuroscience itself has been debated. However, what is clear is that they portray a particular understanding of children and childhood, one that is marked by a lack of acknowledgment of child personhood. Using an analysis of key government-commissioned reports and additional advocacy documents, this article illustrates the ways that the mind of the child is reduced to the brain, and this brain comes to represent the child. It is argued that a highly reductionist and limiting construction of the child is produced, alongside the idea that parenting is the main factor in child development. It is concluded that this focus on children's brains, with its accompanying deterministic perspective on parenting, overlooks children's embodied lives and this has implications for the design of children's health and welfare services.

This report sets out findings of a rapid-ethnographic research project commissioned by The Children’s Society and conducted by a research team from Aston University into the experiences of families living in Kingshurst – a neighbourhood within the metropolitan borough of Solihull in the West Midlands.

What role do the media play in the medicalization of sleep problems? This article, based on a British Academy funded project, uses qualitative textual analysis to examine representations of insomnia and snoring in a large representative sample of newspaper articles taken from the UK national press from the mid-1980s to the present day. Constructed as `common problems' in the population at large, insomnia and snoring we show are differentially located in terms of medicalizing—healthicizing discourses and debates. Our findings also suggest important differences in the gendered construction of these problems and in terms of tabloid and `broadsheet' newspaper coverage of these issues. Newspaper constructions of sleep, it is concluded, are complex, depending on both the `problem' and the paper in question.

This research, based on qualitative interviews and non-participant observation, emerges from a larger study investigating what factors influence the ‘contraceptive careers’ of British women in their 30s. The women informants recognized that contraceptive products often impacted on their health, but viewed them as distinct from ‘medical matters’. Rather than doctors being seen as having expertise, it was women health professionals, be they nurses, midwives, health visitors or doctors, who were perceived as the ones who ‘know’ about contraception, through an assumption that they are contraception users. This embodied knowledge is valued by the women above their formal medical training. I will also show how general practice surgeries and family planning clinics were viewed as gendered spaces, which altered the expectations and experiences of the women during contraceptive consultations. This study found that as ‘real’ expertise over contraception stems from embodied rather than textual knowledge, the women’s choices were grounded by a gendered sense of trust.

In Spring 2009, the School of Languages and Social Sciences (LSS) at Aston University responded to a JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) and Higher Education Academy (HEA) call for partners in Open Educational Resources (OER) projects. This led to participation in not one, but two different OER projects from within one small School of the University. This paper will share, from this unusual position, the experience of our English tutors, who participated in the HumBox Project, led by Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies (LLAS) and will compare the approach taken with the Sociology partnership in the C-SAP OER Project , led by the Centre for Sociology, Anthropology and Politics (C-SAP). These two HEA Subject Centre-led projects have taken different approaches to the challenges of encouraging tutors to deposit teaching resources, as on ongoing process, for others to openly access, download and re-purpose. As the projects draw to a close, findings will be discussed, in relation to the JISC OER call, with an emphasis on examining the language and discourses from the two collaborations to see where there are shared issues and outcomes, or different subject specific concerns to consider.

Background: As Internet use grows, health interventions are increasingly being delivered online. Pioneering researchers are using the networking potential of the Internet, and several of them have evaluated these interventions. Objective: The objective was to review the reasons why health interventions have been delivered on the Internet and to reflect on the work of the pioneers in this field in order to inform future research. Methods: We conducted a qualitative systematic review of peer-reviewed evaluations of health interventions delivered to a known client/patient group using networked features of the Internet. Papers were reviewed for the reasons given for using the Internet, and these reasons were categorized. Results: We included studies evaluating 28 interventions plus 9 interventions that were evaluated in pilot studies. The interventions were aimed at a range of health conditions. Reasons for Internet delivery included low cost and resource implications due to the nature of the technology; reducing cost and increasing convenience for users; reduction of health service costs; overcoming isolation of users; the need for timely information; stigma reduction; and increased user and supplier control of the intervention. A small number of studies gave the existence of Internet interventions as the only reason for undertaking an evaluation of this mode of delivery. Conclusions: One must remain alert for the unintended effects of Internet delivery of health interventions due to the potential for reinforcing the problems that the intervention was designed to help. Internet delivery overcomes isolation of time, mobility, and geography, but it may not be a substitute for face-to-face contact. Future evaluations need to incorporate the evaluation of cost, not only to the health service but also to users and their social networks. When researchers report the outcomes of Internet-delivered health care interventions, it is important that they clearly state why they chos