Dr Elizabeth Sutton1
1Monash University
Women are often prepared to expect and indeed aim for a normal/natural birth through pre birth education/classes and interactions with health care professionals. This expectation is often not realised as many women go on to have interventions they did not plan for such as epidurals, assisted births or surgical births leading to women being disappointed in their birthing performance. This presentation will consider this mismatch in the context of an ‘ethics of care for midwifery’ argument put forward by MacLellan (2014). She argues that midwives have a responsibility to support women in birth, however, the ethics of care concept that she constructs assumes a preference for a ‘social model of birth’. This model may not be the preferred model for the birthing woman, and hence, a conflict can arise between the midwife and the birthing woman. This becomes evident if interventions are being requested by the birthing women – particularly pain relief – that the midwife is of the view are not needed. I argue that MacLellan’s model privileges a particular type of birthing, and in so doing, risks a fracturing of the relationship between women and their carers, leading to the deferral or denial of pain relief in birth. Based on data I collected from women having their first baby – I show how this ethics of care and assumed social model of birth can lead to a mismatch between women expectations and actual experience of birth – leading to what I have termed ‘birth dissonance’.
Biography:
Dr Liz Sutton is a medical anthropologist in the areas of patient agency – particularly in relation to reproduction and birth, advance care planning and health service design and change. She has won operational grants worth over $20million and works as a research fellow at the Monash Bioethics Centre.