‘How does it feel to be a problem, #bossbabe?’

In the US, unintended pregnancy has been constructed as a social problem using various frames, including moral and religious frames, economic frames, and, contemporarily, public health frames. Through philanthropic and political funding, large-scale contraceptive interventions seek to solve the problem of unintended pregnancy through individual-level use of long-acting reversible contraception. In this article, I detail a brief history of problematising unintended pregnancy in the US before describing its latest evolution: a social-media-worthy empowerment opportunity. While we have shifted from images of the ‘unwed teen mother’ and ‘welfare queen’ to the image of the empowered ‘boss babe’, the same populations of women are still problematised. The era of social media and the image of the ‘boss babe’ make this problematisation more palatable yet still perpetuate the marginalisation and reproductive coercion of minoritised populations of women.

empowerment discourse · Long-acting reversible contraception · Problematization · public health framing · reproductive coercion · Social media · social problem framing · Unintended pregnancy · US · welfare queens · Gender, Health, and Social Inequality · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Reproductive Health and Contraception