No Care for Distance : The (Market) Logic of Regionalizing Maternity Care

• Main Author: Westin, Martin
• Format: Bachelor Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Uppsala universitet, Kulturgeografiska institutionen 2017
• Subjects: Social Reproduction; Neoliberalism; Maternity Care; Regionalization; Spatial Inequality; Human Geography; Kulturgeografi; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-326420

A wave of maternity unit closure is sweeping through the North Atlantic zone, leaving rural communities without the care they crucially need. In its wake resistance grows, mobilizing against closures in the face of a discourse of economic efficiency and neoliberal austerity. To understand the issue, research on maternity care and geography offer useful insights on the particular costs and consequences of losing access to care but is less useful for engaging the causes behind them. Not suffering from a lack of critical engagement, Marxist theory enables the wave to be understood in terms of changing political incentives and the ways these have come about. The present essay brings the two fields together in an effort to aid local resistance in rural communities, concluding that regionalization does not operate on a logic of its own as is otherwise stated but on the logic of markets, imposed on governments by the neoliberalization of the Western world and beyond. The essay aims to provide the political-economic framework needed to confrontt he logic of markets, neoliberalism, and the capitalist political-economic system that underline the closures.