The epidemiological risk category currently organizes, in Brazil, the management of pregnancies in order to achieve health goals, such as reducing infant and maternal mortality. This category is framed in an entire transformation in the health system, the transition to a new biomedical step based on the assessment and risk monitoring. Few studies in the social sciences took risk as empirical object of study from a perspective of critical analysis of the changes he introduced in social practices. Based on a broader research work with ethnographic methodology, the paper proposes to examine this category in the management of pregnancies in public health services and lower classes of women in the city of Recife, Brazil. The article will examine the modalities of regulation, increasingly individualized and sanitized, linked to the use of the notion of risk by health professionals and stigmatizing social representations for women of lower classes. Finally, the article relativizes the disciplining force of this biomedical category to show how it is subjectivized by women in a relational experience of pregnancy.
risk; pregnancy; regulation; medicalization; healthicization