Bayla Ostrach

The social stigma attached to adolescent childbearing is biologized within biomedical pregnancy and delivery care. Social stigma is embodied as psychosocial stress, and drives medical decision-making on women's behalf in ways that produce unnecessarily damaging outcomes. The specific biological-biological interaction between the (pathologized) pregnant teen body and iatrogenic early inductions, c-sections, and other interventions increase risks of negative maternal-infant outcomes. Presents how the ageism inherent in teen pregnancy stigma intersects with classism, racism, and other systems of oppression to intensify the structural-biological-biological interactions that worsen outcomes.

Explores new directions in syndemics research– revealing what syndemics theory can illuminate about, in particular, stigma-driven reproductive syndemics, carceral syndemics, and syndemics of poverty and malnutrition, as well as oral health syndemics. Links social stigmatization, structural conditions, and how these societal forces drive biological and disease interactions affecting human health, in areas not previously explored through these lenses.

Presents a syndemic model of abortion stigma–pathways of interaction involving 1) abortion-related stigma, which produces, facilitates, and perpetuates interactions between 2) socially pathologized pregnancies ending or intended to end in abortion, making abortion a biomedical aspect of a socially pathologized pregnancy, and 3) the deleterious health consequences of constrained abortion care interacting with a pathologized pregnancy. Together, these biological, biomedical, and structural interactions threaten reproductive health and lives. 

Highlights the diverse ways in which various stigmatized health conditions interact with each other and with social inequalities and stigma, to form syndemics. Addresses how stigma translates from a social condition to various biological conditions.

Examines the disparities experienced by immigrant and other women, documenting the diverse approaches adopted to overcome obstacles to care in a publicly funded health system. Uses accounts from both providers and women seeking care to illuminate what the Catalan healthcare system, during a period of economic crisis and austerity, reveals about access to care and reproductive governance.

Presents follow-up data from a study conducted a year after the policy change described in previous research, showing that even with a successful policy change, reforms are not always permanent or adequate.