Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Opening Up About Birth: An Autoethnographic Account Of Prolonged Labour, Petra B. Elias

The Qualitative Report

A woman’s first pregnancy can be both emotionally exciting and daunting. There are many changes to make, but there is little emotional support to adjust to the role, the focus being on the physical process which is most often managed medically (Spear, 2008; Zasloff, Schytt, & Waldenström, 2007) though warnings about what could occur are not routinely told (Kaitz, 2007, pp. 720-721). This paper presents an autoethnographic story of first time pregnancy and the unfolding labour. The methodology of autoethnography is a useful tool for conveying stories of lived experience at a level of detail often previously unrecorded, evoking for …