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In this article, our concern is to describe how body(ies) and self are performed in women's birth narratives through the mediation of a number of significant elements, including technical devices. We will show how, in these narratives, (1) action is distributed among a series of actants, including professionals and technology; (2) that dichotomies appear which cannot be reduced to one of body/mind, but are more adequately described in terms of ‘body-in-labour'/'embodied self', each of them being locally performed through the mediation of medical practices, knowledge and technologies, the definition of these elements and of their relations being specific to each obstetrical configuration; (3) that part of professionals' activities is devoted to the detailed management of the articulation between the body-in-labour and the embodied self, and to monitoring their joint transformations.

The Dutch obstetrical system rests on the assumption that pregnancy and birth are normal life-events. Because Dutch obstetrics assumes that pregnancy and birth are considered normal until there is evidence of the contrary, midwives, as well as gynecologists, practice an appropriate kind of ‘expectant' care: one tries to interfere/intervene in the birth process as little as possible, and midwives try to keep women out of the second line as long as possible. But it must also be noted that many more ‘low risk' women are choosing for a hospital delivery with their midwife for reasons of comfort, safety, or because many of their peers have done the same .In this chapter we examine why it is that women plan to deliver in hospital, and why they are increasingly referred to specialist care during labor. Our hypothesis is that a marked rupture tends to occur in the obstetrical trajectory designed for women, and that this rupture inscribes itself in the ways women (and midwives) (fail to) trust the working of an unassisted body during labor.

In this paper, we want to suggest that the emotions and sensations that would occur during birth - always assumed to reside in a single, personal body-subject - too are rendered (in)visible and (in)existant in specific ways. As traces of the birth process are being produced by many different participants, so may emotions and sensations. Our point is that given the claim of obstetrical care- givers that birth is a centered and as such highly important event for women as whole persons, it makes sense to study to what extent and how this claim is materialized in birth settings. We assume and argue that sensations, emotions - the domain of psychologists and neurologists mainly - result from specific sociotechnical practices. This does not imply that other professionals studying joy, desires, pain, speak nonsense. It does imply, however, that it makes sense for anthropologists/sociologists of technology too to study such private parts.