Watching the clock: keeping time during pregnancy, birth, and postpartum experiences

In this paper, I analyze how different didactic discourses surrounding pregnancy, birth, and postpartum care portray time in procreative events. I investigate advice regarding procreative experiences offered to women by a variety of "experts", and offered by experts to each other, examining literature which demonstrates the wide range of didactic approaches to procreative events that are accessible in US culture, from masculinist medical orthodoxy--the dominant perspective--to the naturalist/feminist midwifery model, with self-help literature reflecting the influence of both ends of this spectrum as well as of consumer-oriented health activism. I explore how the conceptualization of time in the medical discourse contributes to the overpowering or disempowering of procreating women, and how the self-help and midwifery approaches respond to the medical model--ranging on a continuum from reification to refutation. Obstetrics works on women's bodies to make them stay on time and on course; this quest becomes more obsessively time-focused over time. In contrast, the midwifery discourse centers on women active in time, rather than against it. Self-help book authors line up somewhere in the middle, mostly taking medical management of procreative time for granted and occasionally try to show women ways in which we can buy time or bide our time against medicine.