Birthing Work by Katharine McKinnon

Author:Katharine McKinnon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789811500107
Publisher: Springer Singapore

Conclusion

The bed’s presence in the birth space does something, it shapes that space in particular ways which in turn shape a woman’s experience of birth. It gifts sturdy sides as support, it calls the woman in labour to lie upon it; it holds her in comfort; it betrays her, becoming a frame that displays her for a doctor’s benefit. The bed is a thing made by human hands, but it also has a life and agency of its own, which shapes the birth space in particular ways.

To be attentive to the agency of the bed itself and the way it is caught up in complex relationships, highlights the ways that the space of birth, and the things in that space, may have tangible effects on the experience of birth. The implications of what things are present are not always immediately obvious: what does it mean to get on the bed, what implications for the unfolding birth does this simple action carry, how is power over oneself and one’s child shifted by the interventions that the bed itself makes possible? These are the opaque consequences that flow from allegiances formed or denied with objects in the birth space. Such allegiances can displace the power and agency of the individual woman who is becoming a mother. But it may also mean that objects, the stuff in the birthing space, can be enrolled into strategic coalitions—ones that may enable greater control of a woman over her body. The bed may be moved into the hallway or a woman may allow herself to be strapped to it—each signalling a very different engagement with the agency of the bed and a different set of associated power relations between a mother and her carers. The childbirth assemblage is not, then, a flat expanse of connected actors. The set of connections that form around any given birth take shape through negotiations of power, positioning a mother and baby in different ways in relation to those that are caring for them. A childbirth assemblage comes into being inflected with the competing (or allied) expectations and values of a mother and those animate and inanimate actors present to support her through the birth.

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