Abstract

This books offers the first comprehensive critique of how risk and uncertainty operate in maternity care that relies on the perspectives of service users and service providers. The detailed accounts assembled here show how understandings of risk and uncertainty lead to a particular way of doing pregnancy, labour, and birth in the twenty-first century. Importantly, the book demonstrates that the way risk and uncertainty operate in this clinical context is not inevitable, rather it is a consequence of complex social, political, and cultural processes. Once understood as such, the unmovable becomes movable, the unchallenged is challenged, and the unintended consequences of our hypersensitivity to risk are exposed and tackled.