Unnaturalizing bodies An ethnographic inquiry into midwifery care in Germany

In public discourses, midwifery care figures as a marginalized profession standing in opposition to technocratic obstetrics. Midwives are thought to handle pregnancy and birth as ‘natural’ events, not as those in need of a medical and technical approach. However, discourses that naturalize pregnancy and birth restrict what ‘good’ pregnant-, fetal-, and birthing bodies and ways of lives may look like. Midwifery care practices are more complex, more ambiguous, and more creative than these discourses suggest.
Inspired by feminist science and technology studies of care practices and the material-semiotic approach they utilize, Annekatrin Skeide develops a practice-based approach to midwifery in Germany as an alternative strategy for strengthening midwifery care. Drawing on praxiographic fieldwork in hospitals and homes, in midwife-led birthing places and ob-gyn practices, she avoids opposing midwifery to obstetrics. In her research, Skeide instead shows how ‘medical’ and ‘social’ repertoires are intertwined in midwifery care practices.
Rather than praising midwifery’s inherent and universal ‘goodness,’ Skeide explores how pregnant-, fetal-, and birthing bodies and lives become part of different midwifery care arrangements, bringing together various, changing, and contradictory sets of knowledges, techniques, activities, and values. What good midwifery practices and good pregnant-, fetal-, and birthing bodies and lives are, cannot be set once and for all. But Skeide’s thesis provides tools for analyzing how bodies and lives are enacted in ways that fit their situations, better or worse, and which values or ‘goods’ hence emerge.