Embodying Childbirth Pain to Fight Sexual and Reproductive Injustices

The recent mobilizations against obstetric violence as a daily routine of care as well as the #MeToo campaign have triggered a new wave of articulations of and conflict over sexual and reproductive injustices. We explore birthing sexual and reproductive injustices through the process by which embodied medical and technological advances in maternity care become accepted, contested or routinized. Used appropriately, they can be life-saving procedures. Routinely used, they are accused of social practices of oppression by transforming the experience of childbirth from a “physiological” process and family life event into a medicalized process with complications or surgical procedure. Based on a sociological comparative research focusing on the restructuration in health care work and its organization as a complement to public health policies in France and Canada, we analyze the development of an embodiment process of re-naturalization of childbirth pain as a way of resisting oppression and epistemic injustices (Cohen Shabot, 2021). Based on the analysis of written sources, as well as seventy-five semi-directed interviews and non-participant observations with health professionals, we argue that the analysis of the management of labor pain highlights how the situated negotiations of bodily knowledge opposing the “natural” to the “artificial” are reshaped by the actor’s affects in order to build a shared, embodied “trust” knowledge of pain between birthing people, health professionals and public health policies. These processes open up new spaces of political resistance and negotiation of health and scientific knowledge, but also call into question the growth of the externalization and privatization of public health resulting in intersectional social inequities (e.g. chronic disease, treatment of pain’s cancer, screening).