In this article, I highlight how Romanian women make sense of the losses of pregnancies and babies. Based on 15 months of fieldwork in a Transylvanian town, and on interviews with and observations among 'angel mothers' (women who have lost unborn or live-born children) in the Romanian capital Bucharest, I discuss the disappointments and desires that surface when reproduction goes awry. The criticisms of these 'angel mothers' throw into sharp relief wider disappointments with biomedical, political, and religious establishments, and continuing social struggles in postcommunist Romania. Although women's personal predicaments are thus deeply connected to broader structural shortcomings, their coping strategies are highly intimate and nonpolitical. Women focus on creating a spiritual bond between themselves and their lost babies-one that transcends the hardships of earthly life and makes women proud to be the mothers of little angels.

a b s t r a c tStudies on fertility in Africa have known a major paradigm shift when demographic concerns about 'overpopulation' came to be replaced by new ideas about reproductive health, rights, and choices during the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD). Whereas this shift has allowed for more recognition of losses during pregnancy which had been virtually absent in previous demographic accounts of high fertility rates, the new discourse on rights and choices turns most of its attention to induced loss. Losses that spontaneously occur remain merely bound to the medical realm. Yet this paper shows that for many women in Africa and elsewhere, spontaneous pregnancy loss is a daily life reality which is inherently related to many social affairs, i.e. life and death, illness and suffering, marriage and kinship, the body and personhood. The rather reductionist biomedical discourse prevalent in the global health arena largely ignores these themes and social complexities e thus causing a gap between health policies and daily life realities for women. Drawing on eleven months of anthropological fieldwork in Cameroon in 2004 and 2008, this article explores the way in which socio-cultural insights could contribute to a better understanding of the experiences of women coping with pregnancy loss. The notions of 'vital conjunctures' and 'social bodies' will form an alternative approach to decision-making in case of reproductive mishaps. By applying these concepts to the personal story of an informant, their relevance and contribution to an interdisciplinary discussion on the topic become clear. The author argues for an integration of anthropological expertise in international reproductive health debates and explores how interdisciplinary work could make health policies on reproductive loss less marginal than is the case at present.

Link to publication General rightsIt is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulationsIf you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: http://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. Abstract Current international attention to reproductive health behaviour is inspired by a western celebration of individual rights, autonomous action and rational choice. A predominant idea is that individuals should be free to act in accordance with their reproductive intentions and that, in doing so, they will attain their desired (and quantifiable) fertility outcomes. Yet such a framework leads to a misrepresentation of the reproductive dynamics on the ground, because individual fertility intentions are often not a priori defined, decisions are often not the result of rational calculation and reproductive happenings do not exist in a social vacuum. This article provides sociocultural evidence for a different conceptualisation of reproductive health behaviour. On the basis of long-term anthropological fieldwork in the East Province of Cameroon, I will analyse the complexities of fertilityrelated decision-making. Two case studies from the field will show that reproductive happenings are often characterised by indeterminacy and contingency. In order to understand the complex ways in which women give direction to these uncertainties, I propose an encompassing framework of reproductive navigation that explicitly acknowledges the influence of sociality and corporeality on fertility aspirations and actions.

Current international debates and policies on safe motherhood mainly propose biomedical interventions to reduce the risks during pregnancy and delivery. Yet, the conceptualisations of risk that underlie this framework may not correspond with local perceptions of reproductive dangers; consequently, hospital services may remain underutilised. Inspired by a growing body of anthropological literature exploring local fertility-related fears, and drawing on 15 months of fieldwork, this paper describes ideas about risky reproduction and practices of pregnancy protection in a Cameroonian village. It shows that social and supernatural threats to fertility are deemed more significant than the physical threats of fertility stressed at the (inter)national level. To protect their pregnancies from those social and supernatural influences, however, women take very physical measures. It is in this respect that biomedical interventions, physical in their very nature, do connect to local methods of pregnancy management. Furthermore, some pregnant women purposefully deploy hospital care in an attempt to reduce relational uncertainties. Explicit attention to the intersections of the social and the physical, and of the supernatural and the biomedical, furthers anthropological knowledge on fertility management and offers a starting point for more culturally sensitive safe motherhood interventions.

Link to publication General rightsIt is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulationsIf you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: http://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. Abstract Current international attention to reproductive health behaviour is inspired by a western celebration of individual rights, autonomous action and rational choice. A predominant idea is that individuals should be free to act in accordance with their reproductive intentions and that, in doing so, they will attain their desired (and quantifiable) fertility outcomes. Yet such a framework leads to a misrepresentation of the reproductive dynamics on the ground, because individual fertility intentions are often not a priori defined, decisions are often not the result of rational calculation and reproductive happenings do not exist in a social vacuum. This article provides sociocultural evidence for a different conceptualisation of reproductive health behaviour. On the basis of long-term anthropological fieldwork in the East Province of Cameroon, I will analyse the complexities of fertilityrelated decision-making. Two case studies from the field will show that reproductive happenings are often characterised by indeterminacy and contingency. In order to understand the complex ways in which women give direction to these uncertainties, I propose an encompassing framework of reproductive navigation that explicitly acknowledges the influence of sociality and corporeality on fertility aspirations and actions.