“Pregnancy over 60, where is common sense?”: Swiss press discourses on late pregnancy achieved through medically assisted procreation

The present study investigates media discourse about “late pregnancy” (LP) which, in the Frenchspeaking Swiss press, refers to postmenopausal pregnancy. LP is a relatively new phenomenon giving raise to debates in the media and within the broader society about whether this new form of motherhood, and the application of medically assisted procreation in this context, is legitimate or not. Drawing upon a dialogical approach to the theory of social representations and media discourse analysis, we investigated a set of 44 articles extracted from six leading newspapers between January 2005 and February 2011. The aim of the analysis was twofold: first, we intended to identify the themes of the media debate on LP and to unveil the cultural assumptions and social representations they rely upon; second, we examined the specificity of the scientific and medical discourse within this debate. Our findings show that moral considerations are at the very core of the debate and they engage scientific and medical concerns as means of legitimising certain perspectives on motherhood and upbringing. These findings are discussed in light of the communicative activity type specific for media reporting and its normative tendency in the construction of consensual realities in a given society.