Is social support good for the health of mothers and babies?

Abstract

The article examines the evidence that social support in pregnancy is associated with improved health of mothers and babies. Its starting point is the professional medical ideology and practice of antenatal care which, from a beginning that emphasized the ‘care’ and support element, has increasingly shifted in the last 30 years to assume the character of a technological surveillance programme. Different notions, measures and explanations of the possible effect of social support are considered, and the issue of the link between social support and reproductive health is located in the framework of the literature on social support and health more generally. Three main groups of studies are reviewed in terms of evidence for or against social support being good for the health of mothers and babies: observational studies describing mothers' own social networks and relationships in terms of different patterns of pregnancy outcome; intervention studies containing a support element but not carried out on the basis of random allocation of mothers to experimental and control groups; and randomized controlled trials of social interventions in pregnancy. It is concluded that these studies provide strong evidence in favour of the idea that socially supported mothers benefit from improved pregnancy outcomes.