Emotional labour: Exploring emotional policy discourses of pregnancy and childbirth in Ontario, Canada

Abstract

In 1991, Ontario became the first Canadian province to pass legislation establishing midwifery as a self-regulated healthcare profession and integrating it into the provincial healthcare insurance plan. Since its implementation, there has been a partial convergence of obstetric practice in the province, where, despite seemingly distinct professional philosophies of care, both midwives and physicians cohere around representations of pregnancy and birth as “normal” or “natural” life events rather than medical conditions requiring treatment. In this paper, I suggest that understanding this convergence and the effects produced by it requires an interrogation of the emotional policy discourses that shape (and are shaped by) the ways we experience the world around us. In doing so, I develop a framework for tracing the emotional policy discourses surrounding pregnancy and birth from the turn of the 20th century until the early 1990s, demonstrating that these representations reflect the merging of two emotional registers, joy and fear, where pregnancy and birth are represented as joyous, life changing events, but where joy is tempered by the fear of complications and potential tragedy. I thus show that contemporary emotional landscapes bind various “birth experts” and bracket “expertise” around particular forms of knowledge, shaping expert and maternal subjectivities along gendered, racialized, ableist, and class-based lines.