title: Confronting diminished epistemic privilege and epistemic injustice in pregnancy by challenging a "panoptics of the womb".
abstract: This paper demonstrates how the problematic kinds of epistemic power that physicians have can diminish the epistemic privilege that pregnant women have over their bodies and can put them in a state of epistemic powerlessness. This result, I argue, constitutes an epistemic injustice for many pregnant women. A reconsideration of how we understand and care for pregnant women and of the physician-patient relationship can provide us with a valuable context and starting point for helping to alleviate the knowledge/power problems that are symptomatic of the current system and structure of medicine. I suggest that we can begin to confront this kind of injustice if medicine adopts a more phenomenological understanding of bodies and if physicians and patients--in this case, pregnant women--become what I call "epistemic peers."
authors.affiliation: University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky, USA lauren.freeman@louisville.edu.
authors.forename: Lauren
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Freeman
mesh_terms: D001318:Authoritarianism; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007743:Labor, Obstetric / Q000523:psychology*; D010686:Philosophy, Medical; D010817:Physician-Patient Relations; D011247:Pregnancy / Q000523:psychology*; D016216:Ultrasonography, Prenatal / Q000523:psychology*; D016387:Women's Health; D014933:Women's Rights
keywords: Foucault; epistemic injustice; epistemic peers; epistemic privilege; phenomenology; pregnancy