Paper short abstract:

How can we conceptualise birthing care ethics across a bifurcated South African health care system? This paper examines what we call technologies of care in the experiences of women in Cape Town using both the public and private healthcare sector.

Paper long abstract:

In South Africa, the state provides free maternity care in a primary healthcare framework that functions side-by-side with some of the world’s most expensive private healthcare. Researchers have focused mostly on the public sector where the majority receive community level care from nurses, and less on the care women receive from medical specialists practising in-rooms at state-of-the-art private hospitals. Problematically, this makes the public sector hyper-visible in questions of care, while erasing from view private sector carelessness.

We employ a care ethics to understand the difference that difference(s) make in matters of maternity care. We analyse antenatal classes, c-sections, and socio-material performances of birth as technologies of care that enact difference(s) by situating maternal experiences according to a hierarchy of care. Where care in maternal matters erases the conditions that give rise to such hierarchies, our paper argues for a care ethics that makes explicit the cuts these difference(s) make

We draw on a range of maternity care practices, discourses, structural arrangements, and material relations to notice the way different motherhoods materialise in the caring technologies deployed on behalf of poor or wealthy soon-to-be mothers in Cape Town. Claiming an inheritance from science and technology studies and feminist new materialism, we resist the impulse towards binary thinking, despite our research field being commonly staged as bifurcated. As such we attempt analysis towards birthing futures through an ethico-political response to South African social life that is lived as a messy overlay of entangled parts.