Les Vraies Femmes Camerounaises: Healthcare-Seeking Negotiations of Motherhood Among Women in Yaoundé, Cameroon

This study explores how women in Yaoundé, Cameroon make maternal healthcare decisions before, during, and after pregnancy based on notions of motherhood. Interviews with 31 pregnant women in biomedical healthcare settings,... [ view full abstract ]

This study explores how women in Yaoundé, Cameroon make maternal healthcare decisions before, during, and after pregnancy based on notions of motherhood. Interviews with 31 pregnant women in biomedical healthcare settings, observations of hospital practices, and lived experiences between February and June of 2015 provide the main sources of data for this study, which was framed and contextualized by various anthropological sources. The narratives of Yaoundéen mothers show that their maternal healthcare-seeking behavior reflects a negotiation of globally, nationally, and biomedically determined conceptions of (in)fertility, pregnancy, and childcare with the socially embedded notions of motherhood as well as the realities of their individual lives. My research shows that the Yaoundéen female body becomes a symbolic arena on which these conflicting notions of motherhood manifest. However, these women demonstrate varying strategic approaches to managing each stage of their motherhood, revealing the way in which Yaoundéen women, despite the ideological constraints of locally-informed and socially-disembedded notions of motherhood overall, have a certain degree of agency in their reproductive choices. I thus aim to explore the particular context and meaning of African motherhood, concluding that the negotiation practices of these Yaoundéen women are fundamentally connected to the maintenance of critical kinship relations.