ABSTRACT
The taxi driver’s words were eerily prophetic-a week to the day after my arrival, local newspaper headlines (Saurí, 2012) announced the Catalan government’s compromise with Spain’s imposed austerity measures, implementing an unprecedented health system waiting period for immigrants. Although the new three-month residency requirement was not meant to apply to pregnant women, my findings suggest immigrant women in fact encountered more delays while navigating the health system than did non-immigrant women. Many women and providers, not just immigrants and those who cared for them, encountered delay factors and motivations produced by the crisis, austerity, and problematic implementation of resulting cuts, in the Catalan health bureaucracy-despite the widely perceived Catalan commitment to ensuring health care access for all.
