Gender a výzkum / Gender and Research . X:X | DOI: 10.13060/gav.2025.015

Everything Is the Way It Should Be: Ethics, Relationality and ‘Natural Childbirth’

Ema Hrešanová ORCID...

Fakulta sociálních věd Univerzity Karlovy

In this article I describe the birthing experiences of twenty-five Czech women who desired ‘natural childbirth’. Adopting Zigon’s phenomenological-ontological perspective on moral experience, I aim to show how these women conceptualise ‘natural birth’ and accomplish related ideas during their birth through ethical enactments of multiple relationships with intra-human actors (the foetus, the birthing body, the placenta) and inter-human actors (the intimate partner, various birth care providers). These form moral assemblages, which allow us to see the birthing body as an inherently relational ethical space. The successful completion of ‘natural childbirth’ requires women to follow their ‘inner voice’, which, however, can be polyphonic, fragmented, and sometimes contradictory. Women practise attunement, mindfulness, and the right timing of ethical enactments to harmonise these relations, and to arrive at an affective knowing that everything is the way it should be. However, sometimes there are actors who leap in and undermine these efforts.

Keywords: phenomenology of birth, moral experience, embodied subjectivity

Received: December 11, 2024; Revised: August 16, 2025; Accepted: September 1, 2025; Prepublished online: November 4, 2025