Transnational healthcare practices in the enlarged Europe: the case of Polish migrant women in Ireland and their pregnancy and childbirth practices

The 2004 EU enlargement and the subsequent migratory movements of citizens from the new member states (NMS) to old EU countries created a new transnational space in which biomedical regimes, as practiced in various locations, come together. In this study, I explore the new transnational space created by the migratory movements of Polish women living in Ireland and their healthcare practices associated with pregnancy and childbirth. I use these practices as a starting point to reflect on the power configurations characterising healthcare, particularly maternity services, in Ireland and in Poland. The study aims to answer two complementary research questions. First, how Irish and Polish healthcare services regulate women’s (pregnant) bodies? Second, how Polish migrant women engage with these regulatory regimes and how these engagements are influenced by the position they occupy in larger power configurations in the host and home countries? In order to answer these questions, I adopt an encompassing perspective attentive to the larger context of structural configurations concerning healthcare in Ireland and in Poland, as well as the lived experiences of migrant women who engage with these services. In order to grasp the complexity of Polish migrant women’s transnational healthcare practices, I build my theoretical tools on three larger concepts: medicalisation, healthcare pluralism and transnational healthcare practices. I use a variety of methods and sources: qualitative semi-structured interviews but also elements of participant observation, informal conversations with Polish women, healthcare professionals and community activists in Ireland and in Poland, as well as analysis of secondary data such as reports, newspaper articles, and internet forums. The study shows that Polish and Irish biomedical regimes differently regulate women’s bodies. However, these differences go beyond the national realisations of biomedicine, and result in the internal diversification of healthcare services in each country. Women, depending on their social positions, engage with these various realisations of biomedical regimes. As the study suggests, their active engagements should be seen in terms of their quest for a very specific enactment of biomedical regime, namely “personal biomedicine”