Trust, Power and Agency in Childbirth: Women's Relationships with Obstetricians (Report‪)‬

Introduction The rhetoric of 'choice' in childbirth has become omnipresent both in Australia and internationally. However, many critics point to the complexity of this neo-liberal notion of autonomous choice in childbirth, highlighting the social, embodied and discursive constraints on women's agency in the context of a medically dominated system of institutional care (Anderson, 2004; Bewely & Cockburn , 2004; Beckett, 2005; Bryant, Porter et al., 2007; Bergeron, 2007). While women are commonly viewed as self-governing and independent, agency is often limited by the set of choices made available by obstetricians in localised cultural contexts and mediated through hegemonic medical knowledge and the workings of neo-liberalism (Behague, 2002; Bryant, Porter et al. 2007: 1197). Cultural ambivalence and fear surrounding normal birth in contemporary culture (Reiger & Dempsey, 2006) further complicates the notion of 'choice' in relation to childbirth, although little attention has been focused on the ways women experience these hegemonic cultural discourses within individual relationships with their obstetricians.