Becoming a birth mother of a child with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome .

摘要

The term and the meanings associated with 'Fetal Alcohol Syndrome' (FAS) originates from, and to a large extent has become institutionally colonized by, a positivistic-science dominated bio-medical model. This dissertation houses a qualitative inquiry into the lived experience effects and affects of what it means to become and be a birth mother of a child diagnosed with FAS.;To accomplish this inquiry, a hermeneutic phenomenology methodology was employed to provide a thick descriptive and significantly interpretive frame by which birth mothers with children diagnosed with FAS could be engaged with in meaningful, non-threatening conversations about their life experiences. This novel approach resulted in conversational -- interview data, hermeneutically cared for, showing the lives of eight (8) women between the ages of twenty-five (25) and sixty (60) all of whom had given birth to one or more children medically diagnosed with FAS. Thus, this study sought to honour the often unheard voices its participant-women whose lives were significantly fraught with poverty, trauma, abuse, violence, and alcoholism.;Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, in contemporary Western society, has become overtly represented as a moralized disability. As such, the dissertation locates---historically, culturally, socially, politically, and medically---the evolution of a prevailing discourse, grounded in the bio-medical definition of FAS, that suggests if only women refrain, by choice, from alcohol use during pregnancy, then FAS will cease to exist. Discourse on prevention suggests if pregnant women do not refrain from alcohol, then these mothers-to-be must be held responsible---ethically, socially, morally, medically, politically, etc.---for any alcohol-related difficulties the child experiences. Although there are 'takes' and 'solutions' on what to do about FAS in medical or political or cultural environments, there are very few studies that offer any in-depth insights or understandings of the lives of birth mothers who, indeed, give birth to a child diagnosed with FAS. Therefore, the purpose of the research advanced in this dissertation is to develop deeper understandings of the lived experiences of birth mothers of children diagnosed with FAS.