Encuentros sanadores: Biomedicina y catolicismo en los itinerarios de gestación y duelo de los no nacidos en la Argentina contemporánea

Abstract

This chapter addresses women‟s „healing encounters‟ with people towhom socie ty attributes exceptional qualities or with the figure of a saint, in contexts/spaces offered by the Catholic religious institution. As steps within a broader therapeutic itinerary, these encounters revealthe ties between biomedicine and religion in the health-disease-care process in Argentina. The chapter focuses particularly on two events:the search for pregnancy and gestational bereavement. For such purpose, and according to the itineraries and the chronology of attributingmeanings, it refers to the biomedical encounter and then to the healing encounter. It is noted that when people are faced with reproductive difficulties or gestational losses, the situational mobilization of religious knowledge, practices, techniques and discourses helps to process theseevents and contributes from emotional and community standpoints.The empirical architecture of this study is based on multisite ethnography conducted during 2009-2015 and 2017-2019.