Moreover, hospitals are made up of rules and set procedures certain things must be done in certain ways at certain times and in certain places. In the role of patient a mother is vulnerable, but she is vulnerable twice over, for she has not only her own interests to defend but her baby’s. In entering hospital to give birth a woman becomes part of that great and growing debate about who is having the baby: the mother, the medical profession, the hospital, the family, and the state. But the issue of who controls birth is part of childbirth today in a more general sense. It reveals that certain themes run through the accounts of birth gathered in the course of research: the problem of recognition, the clash of expectations and reality, and the question of control. This chapter considers the experience of childbirth.
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