Progressing through labour and delivery: Birth time and women's experiences

Abstract

In many accounts of birthing in Western societies, a divergence between ‘medical time’ and ‘natural birthing time’ is identified as a key point of conflict between women's expectations and experiences and medical protocols for birthing. Obstetrical control, with its focus on delineated birth stages and time limits, is represented in conflict with women's birthing rhythms. Drawing on interview data and contemporary feminist theorisations of time, this article suggests that this model of temporal conflict fails to capture the complexity of birthing time since a sense of temporal progress towards delivery is important to labouring women, as well as part of the medical model of birth. The data was gathered through individual face-to-face semi-structured interviews which lasted between 60 and 90 min with ten women in Melbourne, Australia. Women birthing drew on formal and informal information sources to situate their embodied experiences, working hard to develop their own timelines for the task of birthing. The findings suggest that women's experiences of birth cannot simply be understood as conflicts between medical timelines, and ‘natural’ birthing temporalities, since women used communication about time to develop their own birth stories and generate a sense of progress and forward movement towards delivery.