As Carole Browner explains in her foreword: "These chapters compellingly reveal that although we anthropologists tend to speak of biomedicine in hegemonic terms, in fact its penetration is quite variable and often ambivalently met. . . .
Risk, Reproduction, and Narratives of Experience
sheds new light on a troubling core aspect of medicalization processes, which simultaneously render pregnant women more docile subjects even as they are impelled to actively engage with biomedicalized prenatal care regimes. . . . We also see that a consummate means by which states seek to consolidate power in the reproductive realm is through expansion of the biomedical concept of risk. This critical observation emerges repeatedly in this collection."