Childbirth in a Technocratic Age: The Documentation of Women’s Ex ...

scalp—for reasons she did not understand. Two other study mothers mentioned wanting birthing tubs but wondered whether the hospitals to which their public insurance restricted them would allow their use.

Additionally, the developmental status of obstetric interventions used with increasing frequency, such as labor induction and planned surgical delivery, constrains their potential to consistently deliver promised benefits with predictable or known consequences. As becomes evident in later chapters, only a few women who had full faith in medical and pharmacological treatments as the key to worry-free birth described their subsequent experiences in positive terms. A few mothers said their epidural relieved pain as anticipated; a few women had generally positive experiences with planned cesarean surgery. But many more found themselves surprised by the failure of an anticipated treatment to fulfill their expectations.

This brings us back to Maggie, whose decision to plan an epidural led her to feel “carefree” about her upcoming birth. When she went into labor a few months later, she traveled to the hospital in the early morning hours, and because there was a long line of patients awaiting help from the single available anesthesiologist, Maggie waited her turn. The anesthesiologist finally arrived and successfully placed Maggie’s epidural—a procedure involving careful insertion of several needles and a catheter in the lower spine—after several painful attempts. Unfortunately, like a small but significant percentage of women, Maggie found the epidural “totally ineffective,” adding, “I could feel everything, every contraction, the tearing. And the stitching up.” Afterwards, Maggie’s nurse reportedly told her she had been “lucky” that she had not contracted a “flesh-eating staph infection” from the procedure, as the mother next door had, leading Maggie to say she wished she’d “never gotten the thing” because “it didn’t work anyway.”

In the context of the contemporary childbirth culture, I asked what early 21st-century mothers expected to happen in childbirth, how their experiences matched their expectations, and how satisfied they were with the process overall. Childbirth involves a mother’s physical self, her psyche, her social role, and her community at large, and that depth of involvement alone sufficiently justifies any examination