Precarious motherhood Maternal health/care and the state in Los Angeles, USA

This doctoral thesis explores the impact of State-induced precarity on the maternal health and mother work of Central American asylum-seeking women living in Los Angeles, U.S. Using ethnographic data collected from 2019-2021, I trace how multiple forms of precarity increase in the lives of Central American asylum-seeking women as they navigate healthcare and social service access while caring for their children. Likewise, I explore service providers’ understanding of and responses to women’s precarity– specifically Home Visitation staff and Community-Based Doulas. Through this research, I demonstrate how precarity is induced in the lives of racialized, marginalized asylum-seekers in the U.S. through various methods of structural violence such as legal violence, infrastructural violence and reproductive governance. Additionally, I discuss how structural racism further perpetuates precarity for racialized, marginalized women through the white medical gaze and State surveillance of their parenting practices. Together, I argue that these forms of precaritization are mechanisms of reproductive violence that must be attended to in order to ensure the advancement of reproductive justice in the United States.