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Abstract

When longing for motherhood causes concernThis article provides insights into how marginalized women’s motherhood, both historically and today, is a key concern for welfare interventions. More specifically, the article explores how notions of ‘appropriate motherhood’ shape welfare professionals’ use of baby simulators as an educational tool to train and guide the practices of marginalized women eager to become mothers. The article is based on material collected through a qualitative study of baby simulator interventions in Denmark. This includes interviews with welfare professionals as well as ethnographic observations of intervention practices. The findings demonstrate how notions of appropriate motherhood, informing welfare interventions, have shifted historically from moral toward more riskoriented understandings. Furthermore, the findings show that welfare professionals use the baby simulators to promote an ideal of appropriate motherhood, which is based on middle-class notions of care, self-control, independence, and labor market success.

The politics of Danish IVF: reproducing the nation by making parents through selective reproductive technologies

“…As such, IVF shares its normative selective potential with other selective reproductive technologies in Denmark. As research on teenage mothers in Denmark shows, for example, the training of these mothers by health professionals to become good mothers with the help of the so-called baby simulators involves similar parenthood and citizenship ideals as we were able to show in in relation to access to IVF (Søgaard 2018a(Søgaard , 2018b. Likewise, research on care practices in Danish neonatal intensive care units shows that what kind of care premature infants receive and thus what chances of survival they have depends on whether or not the infant's biographic relations and networks can be identified as reflecting reproductive futures in a biopolitical sense (Svendsen 2015;Svendsen et al 2018).…”

Babyrobotter og cyborgforældreskab blandt marginaliserede unge

“…I tråd med dette følges deltagerne taet af en fagprofessionel, som både før, under og efter et forløb forsøger at rådgive og vejlede deltagerne i, hvordan de bedst gør kompetent foraeldreskab. Andetsteds har jeg beskrevet, hvordan denne vejledning også rummer en raekke normative fordringer, som konstruerer den gode mor og foraelder som én, der opfører sig ansvarligt, som er i stand til at skabe et hygiejnisk, trygt og økonomiske stabilt hjem, og som er selvopofrende og tilsidesaetter egne behov for derigennem at hellige sig opfyldelsen af barnets behov (Søgaard, 2017). Babysimulatoren et således et teknologisk redskab, der både anvendes til at skabe et realistisk billede af hverdagslivet som foraeldre, samt et redskab, der bruges til at vurdere og traene potentielt kommende mødre og faedre i forhold til ideer om passende foraeldreskab.…”