Childbirth as ritual in Brazil: young mothers' experiences

The article examines childbirth in a public hospital in Salvador, Brazil, as a multidimensional, embodied process and as a rite of passage. The birth narratives of young, poor, black mothers are seen through ethnography of the obstetric centre, run by white, middle-class obstetricians. The article follows the biosocial process of birth, tracing the development and mutation of loneliness, fear, and pain into motherlove. This subjective journey is generated within the social interactions constituting the physiological birth events. Primiparous women are shown to construct the birth as a rite of passage into legitimate motherhood, in the face of a hegemonic symbolic frame that stigmatizes youthful motherhood and delegitimizes reproduction amongst young, black, low-income women. Hospital childbirth's most powerful social effect is the constitution and consecration of a race/class divide.