ABSTRACT
The author focuses on emotions in medical practice came out of own difficulty in remaining emotionally detached during the birthings. He witnessed during the fieldwork at a Swedish university hospital birthing centre. He takes into account one aspect of the power dimensions of the organization of heterogeneous medical work, namely emotions, departing from a feminist conception of emotion work and including the notion of abjection. Both doctors and midwives at the birth clinic articulate both modes of knowledge. The new monitoring technology, STAN, is designed to replace foetal monitoring through cardiotocography (CTG), a method in use since the seventies in births defined as risky. STAN combines the widely used CTG with foetal electrocardiography. The main benefit of STAN is that it can help diagnose foetal oxygen deficiency during labour. Previous methods to identify foetuses suffering from oxygen deficiency rely on analysis of blood samples taken from the foetus scalp.
