Women imagining the ideal birth: Discourses of risk, femininity, and morality

In modernity, women make childbirth choices in a contested discourse of natural versus surgical birth, maternal selfishness versus increasingly intensive and idealized mothering, and the juxtaposition of fetal versus maternal risks. A component of this contested discourse is to be found in the research itself; at one end of this continuum are medical concerns that women are driving the machine of childbirth choices, and are moving perhaps too quickly into consumer/patient-driven 'choices', particularly befitting elective C-sections. At the other end, some feminists and critical social scientists and most alternative health providers argue that women are being oppressed by the overmedicalization of childbirth and must reassert their role as natural mothers whose non-surgical choices are best for mother, and more stridently, for baby.

 This paper takes a critical feminist perspective to examine how women’s choices unfold within existing discourses about modern, western femininity and womanhood. I examine the narratives of young women and pregnant women about their expectations and understanding of what is, to them, an ideal childbirth so as to expose the tensions women who are choosing may encounter between various discourses of femininity, responsibility, and moral motherhood. I argue that the tensions women navigate are polarized between ideas about sexualized youth and nurturant adulthood, purity and fecundity, innocence and the messiness of birth/sex, and responsibility and selfishness. Thus, women's 'choices'  are more complicated than simple questions of managing risk or danger.