The Paradox of Empowerment

Indeed, as Lobel and DeLuca note, one possible way to reduce the adverse effects of cesareans on mothers’ reports of “childbirth satisfaction” would be to encourage them to “develop realistic expectations” (Lobel and DeLuca 2007, 2278) about labor, rather than educating them to resist obstetric practice —as has been the main strategy of the natural childbirth movement. 

One vocal proponent of this position, Rebecca Kukla, noted recently that the process of childbearing is now encountered by many women as a type of “maternal achievement test,” the “symbolic importance” of which has been elevated to such an extent that “it appears to serve as a make-or-break test of a woman’s mothering abilities” (Kukla 2008, 74). For Kukla, the alternative birth movement’s encouragement of such strategies as childbirth classes and birth plans, while originally laudable in intent, is responsible for establishing “completely unrealistic expectations concerning how much control one can possibly have over the laboring process.” As a consequence, the movement is implicated in “setting women up for feelings of failure, lack of confidence, disappointment, and maternal inadequacy when things do not go according to plan, even when mother and baby end up healthy” (75). Thus, critics like Kukla suggest, while the natural childbirth movement styles itself as concerned with empowering laboring women, its establishment of a normative ideal of birth is, ultimately, disciplinary and punitive.