Download or read book Writing Childbirth written by Kim Hensley Owens and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2015-06-24 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on medical texts, popular advice books, and online birth plans and birth stories, as well as the results of a childbirth writing survey, Owens considers how women's agency in childbirth is sanctioned, and how it is not. She examines how women's rhetorical choices in writing interact with institutionalized medicine and societal norms. Writing Childbirth reveals the contradictory messages women receive about childbirth, their conflicting expectations about it, and how writing and technology contribute to and reconcile these messages and expectations.