“I’m very open about it if people ask”: Dosing detail, seeking community and careful censoring in women’s epistemic practices surrounding childbirth experiences

Going through pregnancy and childbirth is an epistemically transformative experience, which can bring new physical, psychological, and relational insights, and thus change the ways in which subjects understand themselves, their bodies, and the world around them. However, it has been argued that the medicalisation of reproductive health care has contributed to a devaluation of the individual epistemic privilege of pregnancy and childbirth. While existing studies on the epistemic value of experiential childbirth knowledge often focus on health care settings, this study explore epistemic practices of women in an array of social settings of their daily life. To explore how childbirth experiences are expressed and shared, in which social spaces, and with references to which kind of knowledge, we conducted two-session semi-structured interviews with nine women who have given birth. In collaboration with a panel of co-researchers with experience of giving birth, we carried out an interpretative phenomenological analysis of the elicited accounts of expressing and sharing information of childbirth experiences in various social contexts.
The interviews presented accounts of complex epistemic practices involving acts of self-censoring as well as seeking for community. Drawing on feminist theories of knowledge, we argue that women's epistemic practices surrounding childbirth experiences are conditioned by societal ambiguities regarding the value of firsthand, embodied childbirth knowledge and perceptions of childbirth as a simultaneously public and private event.
The study provides valuable insights to the complex social and cultural dynamics surrounding perceptions of individual and collective knowledge production connected to the pivotal life event of childbirth.