O corpo grávido: um estudo com gestantes num hospital público

Abstract

Pregnancy can be understood as an experience that involves major changes in women's lives, whether physical, psychological or social. Among these changes, there is the matter of the body and its transformations, focused in the present study. The study concerns revolve around questions of how the ideals of beauty of the body in culture prevailing interfere in this process, in that the body changes associated with pregnancy may be experienced as unwanted, uncomfortable and strange. The Donald Winnicott's theory supports the idea that the constitution of human subjectivity is inseparable from the environment, in this sense, the process of subjective’s motherhood constitution occurs in the context of relational and sociocultural mother. This study is guided by a central question: how pregnant women experience the experiment with a pregnant body nowadays? By having specific objectives: identify how the body changes from pregnancy are perceived and experienced by pregnant women; understand how the aesthetic ideal for the female body prevalent in the culture produces subjetive impacts in pregnant women in relation to body changes experienced during pregnancy. The research was conducted in the antenatal clinic of a public hospital in Maceio, attended by twelve nulliparous pregnant women over eighteen years old. The research instruments for data collection were semi-structured interviews and drawing production. The interviews were conducted individually, audio-recorded, transcribed and subjected to content analysis. The results indicate that experience with a pregnant body occurs in the context of the meaning of pregnancy for the mother and is particularly related to the pregnancy, if it was planned or not. The changes in the body, it surprises more often the women who did not planned the pregnancy, which report that they experience such changes with strangeness. The meaning of bodily changes occurs in the relational context, with references mainly to the partner and to the mother herself. Despite the fact that body changes are more intense in the second and third trimester of pregnancy, the experience of these changes did not appear directly related to gestational period of participants. The ability to generate a life within the body itself emerges as an affective experience positive and rewarding. The availability of breastfeeding observed in the reports seems to meet a social expectation, but can also indicate the development of primary maternal preoccupation. References to beauty standards body established culturally emphatically not appear in the accounts; however, most of the women allude to the idea of a "normal" body as a counterpoint to the pregnant body, referring to the question of the standard and the standardization that is needed in the culture. The drawings were important investigative tools in that were in line with the statements of the participants, assisting in the discussion of results.