Beyond biomedicine: health through social and cultural understanding

This article argues that traditional approaches to reproductive health are concerned with safe motherhood. In the discourse of reproductive health, safe motherhood is defined as the ability to bear and raise children, and to plan and space births for safe pregnancy, focusing strictly on the biological abilities of women [Reproductive Health Matters, 2005, 13: 34]. This fails to account for how women construct, negotiate and maintain their health within their own cultural context. To understand how social context influences meanings of health, in-depth interviews were conducted with young Nepalese women living in poverty. Centralizing women's voices not only creates opportunities for exploring how local context shapes meanings of health but also allows alternative health meanings of the cultural participants to emerge. In particular, by highlighting narratives we are able to understand how women actively (re)construct dominant meanings of reproductive health and in turn act upon meanings that are socially and culturally relevant.