The location of pain in childbirth: natural childbirth and the transformation of obstetrics

In the post‐World War II period obstetrics transformed the nature of its work, partly in response to the challenge of natural childbirth. The transformation is traced by focusing on obstetrics’understanding of pain in childbirth. In reformulating its field of power obstetrics reconstituted its patient‐object to take into consideration the patient's subjectivity which, as a result of the natural childbirth movement, had asserted itself, escaping from the confines in which obstetrics had tried to contain it, and reclaiming for a fleeting instant the pain which signaled a woman's active participation in birth.