Orchestrating moral bearability in the clinical management of second-trimester selective abortion

Laura Louise Heinsen, Camilla Bruheim and Stine Willum Adrian

Social Science & Medicine, 2023, vol. 338, issue C

Abstract: In present-day Denmark, second-trimester selective abortion has become a regular medical event, which has turned selective abortion care into a routinized task for health staff. In this article, we explore what forms of care practices abortion providers in Danish public hospitals engage in. Using in-depth interviews, medical documents and social media data, we show that at the center of selective abortion care provision is not only securing safe medical outcomes, but moral labor orientated towards achieving a morally manageable medical event, permeating institutionally developed clinical guidelines, relational face-to-face care, and ideologically driven encouragement of parental-fetal attachment through the use of material objects and visibility practices. We propose to view these entangled realms of practices as aiming towards generating what we term “moral bearability”, meaning that selective abortion care is orchestrated in particular ways to make the abortion, and the implied making and handling of death, simultaneously bearable for couples and health staff.

Keywords: Moral bearability; Orchestration; Selective abortion; Death; Denmark (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953623006639
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:338:y:2023:i:c:s0277953623006639

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
http://www.elsevier. ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2023.116306

Access Statistics for this article

Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian

More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().