The visiting obstetrician clicks on the first slide of his presentation. A photo of two horses appears on the screen: one, a small white Shetland pony, the other, a large brown draught horse. The obstetrician, representing the hospital that services the southern part of greater metropolitan Auckland, which is home to the largest Māori and Pasifika communities in the city, was address- ing a study day at Auckland’s central city hospital (Counties Manukau Health, 2017). Drawing on long-standing racialized and gendered tropes that have likened women and people of colour to animals (e.g., Dunayer, 1995), the audience was informed that the photo was a visual representation of the embodied difference (in terms of both body size and ethnicity) between the women giving birth in South Auckland—draught horses—versus those women who birth at the central city hospital—Shetland ponies. The audience tittered. The presentation went on to describe the burden of high (and increasing) maternal body weight in South Auckland, an area that has been described as “one of the worlds capitals of obesity” (sic) (Johnston, 2015). The main thesis of the presentation was that the embodied difference between the two hospitals’ birthing populations could account for the poorer maternal and child health outcomes in South Auckland, as well as the growing costs of health care delivery to this population. The obstetrician framed this situation as a crisis for his hospital and emphasized the need to improve his populations’ health choices. What he did not reference was the overwhelming impact of colonization and systemic racism on the social determinants of health that continue to impact Māori and Pasifika communities in South Auckland and elsewhere in Aotearoa New Zealand (e.g., Reid & Robson, 2006).
Parker, G., Pausé, C., & Le Grace, J. (2019). “You’re just another friggin’ number to add to the problem”: Constructing the racialized (m)other in contemporary discourses of pregnancy fatness. In M. Friedman, C. Rice, & J. Rinaldi (Eds.), Thickening fat: Fat studies, intersectionality and social justice (pp. 97–109). Routledge.
