TY  - JOUR
TI  - The Intersection of Reproductive, Work-Life Balance and Early-Education and Care Policies: ?Solo? Mothers by Choice in the UK and Spain
AV  - public
Y1  - 2021/11/29/
VL  - 10
N1  - This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images
or other third-party material in this article are included in the Creative Commons license,
unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license,
users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this
license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
ID  - discovery10141847
N2  - This article focuses on women who have opted to be mothers on their own by choice in the UK and Spain, and how their access to assisted reproductive technologies in the National Health Service was affected because they were 35 years old or older, forcing them to go to private clinics for their treatment. Having given birth to their children, the participants face a second obstacle: the lack of policies that support work-life balance. A third obstacle also arises, in the form of a lack of childcare and early-education provision, particularly in the UK. The last two obstacles affect the whole population, but they are intensified in the case of solo-mother-families where the mother is responsible for simultaneously being the caregiver and the sole economic provider. Solo motherhood by choice highlights the impact of the absence of these policies, and the inequalities that result from current contemporary conceptualizations of family, woman and early-childhood-care and education. This article draws on ethnographic research that took place in the UK and Spain where I conducted 60 in-depth interviews and participant observations. The aim is to provide an analysis capable of capturing and confronting how inequalities affect women-mothers-workers and their children.
UR  - https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci10120458
JF  - Social Sciences
KW  - Public policies; assisted reproductive policies; work-life balance policies; early-education and care policies; UK and Spain; ethnography; solo-mothers-by-choice families
A1  - Bravo-Moreno, A
ER  -