How institutions think: Reproductive health services and migrant women in Italy

Health and social services in Italy frequently essentialize migrant women's reproductive choices as products of ‘culture’ rather than responses to structural barriers, precarious conditions or institutional failures of listening. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Verona in 2018 – including focus groups and interviews with both practitioners and migrant women – this article analyses how, to paraphrase Mary Douglas, reproductive health services ‘think’. Practitioners’ narratives reveal persistent patterns of infantilization and cultural stereotyping, while migrant women's testimonies point to experiences of obstetrical violence and alienation. Yet some street‐level bureaucrats resist these institutional logics, opening space for more reflexive care practices.