Obstetric violence, birth trauma, agency, and care in Ami McKay’s The Birth House

Abstract

Ami McKay’s The Birth House aptly captures how with the advent of obstetric technologies, medical interventions escalated the proportion of women who encounter obstetric violence as part of normal procedures resulting invariably in birth trauma. The novel portrays the dehumanizing experiences of birthing women under the care of a physician who represents the single-sighted perspective of obstetric care, undermining the uniqueness of each delivery experience. The paper analyzes how this narrative captures the phenomenology of obstetric violence during the early twentieth century. The paper aims to study how the novel analyzes the issues such as lack of agency, privacy, and dehumanization experienced by birth mothers in the maternity ward. This paper also aims to discover how the novel advocates for a positive birth experience emphasizing the uniqueness of each birth mother’s experiences. By employing the concepts of obstetric violence, birth trauma, agency, pain, privacy, medical colonization, and positive birth experience, this paper explores the epistemological friction in the notion of maternal care between the indigenous midwives and the traditional Western medical discourse to showcase the relationships among maternal care, obstetric violence, birth trauma, and positive birth experiences. The paper also critiques the novel for its uncritical polarized portrayal of treatments offered by the midwives and physicians.

Keywords:

• obstetric violence
• maternity care
• birth trauma
• midwives
• physicians
• literary narratives

PUBLIC INTEREST STATEMENT

Childbirth is one of the life-altering events in the birthing individual’s life. In the era of biomedicine and medical advancements, childbirth is defined as a pathological condition requiring medical supervision to ensure the safety of the mother and child. While the significance of medical assistance during complicated labors cannot be disregarded, it is also crucial to recognize the subjective experiences of birthing persons. Consequently, analyzing Ami McKay’s The Birth House, this paper aims to locate how the different models of maternal care in the early twentieth century — midwifery and physicians’ care — contribute to different birthing outcomes like birth trauma and positive birthing experience. To this aim, the paper elucidates the complex dynamics among the parturient women, midwives, and physicians as depicted in the novel. Further, the paper argues that although the novel provides a polarized perspective of midwifery and physicians’ treatments, the reality is not always clearly demarcated as portrayed.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the reviewers for their insightful comments to better structure the paper and strengthen the arguments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Conceivably, the stranger’s face is the term of Miss. B’s and Dora’s diagnoses of the medical condition, pre-eclampsia. The clinical symptoms of the stranger’s face and pre-eclampsia are congruous: headaches, vomiting, and severe swelling of the face, hands and legs (McKay ch. 42, 45; Nelson-Piercy, 2020, 5).

Additional information

Funding

All authors certify that they have no affiliations with or involvement in any organization or entity with any financial interest or non-financial interest in the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript.

Notes on contributors

Swathi Mohan

Swathi Mohan has obtained her M.A. (English) from The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India. She is a Ph.D. Research Scholar under the guidance of Dr. Manali Karmakar at Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai Campus. Her research areas include Literary Studies (Birth Narratives), Medicine, and Reproductive Trauma.

Manali Karmakar

Manali Karmakar is an Assistant Professor in English at the Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai Campus. She has earned her Ph.D. from IIT Guwahati and has specialized in the area of Medical Humanities (Literary Studies, Medicine, and Biotechnology). She is the principal investigator of the SPORIC SEED GRANT project titled Labour, Birth, and Agentic Crises in Maternity Ward in the Urban Setting: Pluralistic Qualitative Mixed Method Research.