Experiencing birth trauma: Individualism and isolation in postpartum

Approximately 25–35% of individuals report experiencing a traumatic birth in the United States. Birth trauma has commonly been focused on the experience of labor and delivery itself, with definitions frequently pointing to specific clinical interventions, interactions with providers, and individual expectations during labor and delivery. These definitions however remain too limited, assuming that birth trauma has a discrete temporality—emerging in childbirth—and largely underestimate the social and structural factors that drive trauma. Drawing from interviews conducted between November 2021 and April 2023 with thirty cisgender women who have given birth at least once in the United States, I reveal how the postpartum period is a particularly vulnerable time for trauma emergence, even when absent of difficult delivery experiences. I reveal how social and structural factors in the postpartum period trigger trauma that remains largely invisible, leaving individuals isolated. I situate these women's experiences within the sociological scholarship on trauma, (bio)medicalization, neoliberalism, and risk, to reveal a critical need to expand definitions of, and approaches to, birth trauma.