“Horror stories” for women in childbirth: construction and overcoming of fear in childbirth

Abstract

This paper dwells on personal midwives and “professional” doulas, the two “neighboring” groups of specialists independent of maternity clinics who accompany women during pregnancy, childbirth and the postpartum period, both free of charge and on a paid basis.The purpose of this review is to describe and analyze the texts that represent and interpret fears, worries, apprehensions, panic, anxieties, phobias, frustrations during pregnancy and childbirth, as well as to describe the ways of overcoming such emotions that occur in the studied communities.For this, the author has investigated upon the contexts in which the stories about professional perinatal support, personal experience of pregnancy and childbirth exist; upon the functions, variability and conventionality of these stories; upon their the impact on the participants of the communication; and upon whether such texts correspond to the medical and other explanatory models. An analysis of the texts recorded and narrated by mothers and the representatives of the abovementioned communities in different contexts suggests that the main recipients of such “horror stories” (told in a family/friendship/media/clinical context) “control” the impact of these stories via careful planning and organization of childbirth, as well as by purchasing information, by training, by various techniques, by counseling and both partner support and professional paid support in childbirth. Fears are normalized, rationalized and “defeated” by independent perinatal specialists, who manage to do so both due to an active professional position and through selling various training programs for childbirth, self-help technologies, practices, rituals and professional support services.The circulation of such texts in the studied communities, including the texts depicting and interpreting perinatal fears in childbirth, provides for the construction and translation of various lived experiences and verbalizations of emotions in childbirth (that is, of emotional knowledge); the they also contribute to the (re)production, transmission and competition of popular and/or alternative explanatory models, optimistic practices, emotionally colored rituals and interactions that rationalize, normalize, and conquer the theme of the terrible in childbirth.