“No justice in birth”: Maternal vanishing, VBAC, and reconstitutive practice in Central Florida

Abstract

AbstractMedical experiences offer valuable insight into how medical power can operate to subjugate bodies and subvert wills, revealing the patriarchal nature of institutional medical practice. Such revelations can inform anthropological understandings of power, resistance, and refusal at the intersection of gender and large bureaucratic structures, such as the medical industrial complex. This article explores the subversion of maternal will in the context of cesarean birth and practices around vaginal birth after cesarean (VBAC) as a form of resistance and refusal of biomedical power. Cesarean sections are the most common major surgical procedure in the United States, with one in every three births delivered surgically. For many birthing people, cesarean delivery was neither desired nor expected. Through the birth story narratives of 25 predominantly white women who pursued VBAC, this article proposes the concept of maternal vanishing to describe the process by which birthing people are disempowered during birth. I argue that women who pursued VBAC were engaged in an attempt to reconstitute themselves in subsequent births through a series of tactics that, in some ways, replicate hegemonic notions of neoliberal subjectivity and medical consumerism at the same they resist and refuse them.