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

own competence to make decisions or their ability to act responsibly on their offspring’s behalf.

In sum, contemporary U.S. birth culture, including obstetric practices and the larger context in which those practices occur, places mothers at high risk of seeing their birth experiences diverge further from their birth expectations than in any other historical time or place. With maternal well-being central in the development and maintenance of strong, healthy mother–child relationships, it is essential to examine contemporary maternal expectations and their subsequent lived experiences of labor and delivery.

Previous Research on Expectations and Experiences

Research on matches between expectations and subsequent experiences emphasizes the centrality of one’s subjective view as opposed to external or objective measures of how a given experience might have turned out. In contemporary childbirth culture, in which the view that the “end product” trumps whatever a mother might have had to endure and in which scientific indicators are valued more highly than experiential perspectives, attention to maternal subjective accounts becomes paramount. To put it more plainly, I take an example from one of my interviewees, a first-time mother who expressed persistent, negative thoughts about her birth experience that, contrary to her expectations of proceeding drug-free (her term), instead involved medical labor induction, an epidural, and ongoing oxytocin administration. From a contemporary obstetric perspective, the birth proceeded without complication and resulted in the delivery of a healthy newborn. Both perspectives might be valid, but the mother’s view on her overall experience as widely divergent from what she had defined as normal would necessarily be the more critical driver of her later thoughts and feelings because she most directly experienced the events.

In psychological terms, an experience confirms an expectation when it meets it (expectancy confirmation); an experience disconfirms or violates an expectation when it deviates from it (expectancy violation).