Paper short abstract:

Discourse of anxiety and lack of trust to institutions characterize maternity care in Russia. Women make effort to create quasi-domestic relations within impersonal relations in hospitals. Personified and domestified relations are negotiated and paid for as a way of risk and "fate" management.

Paper long abstract:

Strategic organization of childbirth became an integral part of middle class life project in Russia. Demanding consumers evaluate options, make choices and pay for the service. Women report that childbirth should be controlled and not to be a "roulette wheel". Maternal houses (MHs) advertise paid and unpaid services; future mothers choose between free and paid options, and negotiate delivery conditions.

Why women prefer to pay for childbirth? They tell about anxiety, lack of trust to institutions, professional roles and impersonal relations in MHs. Woman want to avoid risks, to overcome the state of fear - threat to the lives of the mother and the child or health damage. They want to receive high quality of professional treatment and care, and to avoid "soviet" conditions (disregard, lack of privacy and comfort).

It is important for women to be "hold by hand" in labor; women make efforts to create quasi-domestic relations within MH. On the stake is non articulated gendered life of mother and child, women want to escape from health damage and death (perinatal loss, infant and mother's mortality); they pay for the sacral good. Both gender identity and life of two persons are at the stake. Personality and professionalism of obstetrician are considered to be crucial. Not state system, medical institution, nor science (with a low trust) guarantees success but concrete professionals, personified and domestified relations which are negotiated and paid for as a way of risk and "fate" management.