Empowering women through the positive birth movement

Abstract

Childbirth has been positioned as a life changing event that has profound long term psychological effects upon women. This paper adopts a community psychology approach to explore the role that the Positive Birth Movement (PBM may have in tackling negative birth experiences by supporting women before and after birth. Six women who all regularly attend UK based Positive Birth Movement meetings and had given birth to at least one child participated in one to one semi-structured interviews designed to explore the support they received before, during and after their birth, as well as their experiences with the positive birth movement. A Foucauldian inspired discourse analysis explores themes relating to the lack of support and information provided by the NHS and the function of the positive birth movement as a transformative community space which offers social support and information. Within these themes a focus on neoliberalism, choice and the woman's position as an active consumer of health care is critically discussed. It is argued that the PBM has the potential to prepare women for positive birth experiences but more attention needs to be paid to the wider contexts that limit women's ability to make 'free' choice.

Labour Pain, ‘Natal Politics’ and Reproductive Justice for Black Birth Givers

“…In addition to the disciplinary regimes pregnant women are expected to follow to ensure the health of their fetus (Lupton, 2012), what these varying accounts of pain in labour suggest is that women are also made maternal subjects by the expectation that they will articulate a narrative situating their experience of labour and birth – whether empowering or disempowering – as central to becoming a mother. The production of a birth narrative recounts how one experienced, controlled, was overwhelmed by or sought to embrace the pain of labour and has become one of the ways in which maternal subjectivity is structured: ‘the promotion of birth stories, which stress the body’s natural capacity for birth, are presented as key to enabling most women to have good birth experiences’ (Hallam et al, 2019: 336). Social expectations around maternal subjects as self-aware and conscious of their own feelings and bodily sensations invite women to recount the pain of labour as central to their narrative of birth.…”