Katharine McKinnon - Birthing Work: The Collective Labour of Childbirth

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As a mother of three, I have muddled my way through pregnancy and birth in three different places, with three different sets of doctors and midwives. Each time I had to make, and remake, decisions about tests and scans, about how to manage work commitments, care for my changing body, my children, my home, whether and what kind of medications to take or not take, what kind of food to eat, what kind of breastfeeding/swaddling/baby transport/toileting paraphernalia to commit to. Each of these involved some degree of choice and some expression of the values my partner and I hold around pregnancy, birth and childrearing. This project began in the year following the birth of my second daughter at a time when I felt acutely dissatisfied with the intellectual resources available to me as I navigated the sticky spaces of parental decision-making. I wanted something other than moralising discourses about right or wrong choices, the pervasive sense of mother-blame, or the false neutrality of the clinical-sounding language that seemed to infuse so much of the information available to me. It is with this dissatisfaction that this project was born, and, equally, with a desire to find language for the experience of childbearing, an experience that is both deeply profound and profoundly hard work. In this book, I hope to both honour that profound experience and provide some new ways of thinking about what the work of childbirth is and what it means to do that work.

It is always the case that a researcher, an author, is implicated in the design and the findings of the research. Objectivity is always an impossibility. But in the case of this project, I have been more deeply and more personally implicated in the subject matter than ever before. In this book, I have worked to put my own commitments to one side and write from the stories that women shared with us in interviews. I have endeavoured to be true to their views and experiences. But I also acknowledge that there is no way to take a completely neutral position either. This is one reason why each chapter begins with a story taken from my own experiences of childbirth. These were written as I reflected on my births and sought moments that spoke to the themes of that chapter. This is part an acknowledgement that my interest in the issue of childbirth is as much personal as professional, part a desire to connect with readers at an emotional as well as intellectual level, and in part an effort to enact something Ive elsewhere called naked scholarship (McKinnon, 2017): an attempt to work as an academic with an open heart, to make clear my own cares and concerns, while creating a space where the related cares and concerns of others can also stand strong.

When we write things down we are always telling a story, and stories do an unavoidable violence to the messy complicated smudginess of embodied everyday life. Narratives tidy everything up, creating order and meaning. And this always requires an exclusion of something, a decision to make some part of that reality invisible or unimportant. Academic texts are particularly skilful in this regard, as they are often written from the voice of authority, the knowingness of the expert. In these texts there is little room for the flawed, fuller, humanity of the speaker to be heard. I have sought to write this book in a different kind of voiceone that, I hope, begins to practise open-heartedness and emotional connection as a value even within academic texts. I also have sought to make this text accessible to readers outside my field of human geography, thus keeping discussions of theory to a minimum, and attempting to purge the text of unnecessary jargon.