How can the experience of childbirth be described? Does it defeat words? Or is it twisted by being trapped within words so that an event powerfully experienced is reduced to a technical account, a recitation of medical manoeuvres? Some people find it easier than others to put their feelings into words. Questions provoke answers, but the answers may be only clues, signposts. Statistics sketch another kind of partial picture; to know how many women had what kind of pain relief during labour is not to know how much pain was relieved; to be told how many babies were tugged or persuaded into the world with forceps, is not really to know much more than that.

Certain themes run through the accounts of birth gathered in this research; the problem of recognition – is this labour, is this a contraction; the clash of expectations and reality – now I know how it feels, I know how I expected it to feel; the question of control – am I doing this myself, or are other people doing it to me? How to recognise symptoms of impending birth and how to square these with the images collected from mothers, antenatal classes, television programmes, Victorian novels and so forth – these are the classic dilemmas of women having a first baby. But the issue of who controls birth is part of childbirth today in a more general sense. In entering hospital to give birth a woman becomes part of that great and growing debate about who is having the baby: the mother, the medical profession, the hospital, the family, the state. In the role of patient a mother is vulnerable, but she is vulnerable twice over, for she has not only her own interests to defend but her baby’s.