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Confronting Rhetorical Disability: A Critical Analysis of Women’s Birth Plans

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: okhensley{at}gmail.com.

	Abstract

Through its analysis of birth plans, documents some women create to guide their birth attendants’ actions during hospital births, this article reveals the rhetorical complexity of childbirth and analyzes women’s attempts to harness birth plans as tools of resistance and self-education. Asserting that technologies can both silence and give voice, the article examines women’s use of technologies of writing to confront technologies of birth. The article draws on data from online childbirth narratives, a childbirth writing survey, and five women’s birth plans to argue that women’s silencing, or rhetorical disability, during childbirth both prompts and limits the birth plan as an effective communicative tool. The data suggest that the birth plan is not consistently effective in the ways its authors intend. Nonetheless, this analysis also demonstrates that the rhetorical failure of the birth plan can be read as, and thereby transformed into, rhetorical possibility.

First published on December 22, 2008, doi:10.1177/0741088308329217

Written Communication 2009;26:247.

A more recent version of this article appeared on July 1, 2009


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