ABSTRACT
Obstetric technologies have often been conceived in deterministic terms by both their supporters and their critics. The shared assumption is that these technologies are direct applications of obstetric science, tools that straightforwardly realize what they are intended to do. Enthusiasts have emphasized that obstetric technologies are “good” and helpful because they save lives and preserve health. This chapter shows the diversity and creativity of midwifery care relationships that give rise to “medical,” “technical,” and “social” repertoires that run through classic binaries: nature-culture, medical-social, and bodies-technologies. It develops three interdependent analytical steps to understand “obstetric,” “technological,” and “social” genres as parts of one another; to “unnaturalize” pregnant, fetal, and birthing bodies; and to study the various, changing, and contradictory sets of values that obstetric technologies help to craft, thereby shaping different kinds of “good” pregnant, fetal, and birthing lives.
