An ethnography on the hospital room during childbirth.
This paper is an examination of the roles, environments, and relationships inside a hospital labor and delivery room. I have volunteered as a doula or childbirth coach since January of 2001. I was drawn to this type of volunteer work by my interest in becoming a midwife. I decided the best way to find out if midwifery was my calling would be to participate in the action. I met my clients when they came to me seeking my services as a massage therapist and then would subsequently invite me to be an attendant at the birth of their child. We would meet several times before labor began for massage treatments as well as meetings with their spouse (all of the women I will be discussing are married) to create a birth plan which reflected the wishes of the expecting parents from the hospital staff.
For the purposes of this paper I intend to synthesize my observations during five different births which occurred on dates ranging from August 1, 2002 until April 13, 2003. Each birth occurred at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital Labor and Delivery Ward in Santa Barbara, CA. Each birth is unique yet the fundamental happenings are the same. I plan to compare and contrast occurrences during each birth.
I had an agreement with each woman and her husband that I would be "on-call" for them twenty-four hours a day from two weeks before their due date until they had the baby. They would call me as soon as contractions began and would keep me apprised of their progression until they were ready to go to the hospital. Usually it was the husband who would call to alert me his wife had begun having contractions, sounding a little nervous, but if possible I would try to speak with the laboring woman to try and assess the intensity of her labor. On one occasion a woman was sent to the hospital from the doctors office because she started having contractions three weeks early and her previous children had all come early.