Contested Voices – Mixed Emotions: The Insight from the Home Birth Debate

The central theme of the paper will be home birth (with special stress on the situation in Czechia) and the various ways and dynamics of its contestation. The paper – based on the scholarship of sociology of emotions and public policy – aims to bridge the pro-con dynamics and focus on less visible yet significant features of the heated debate that shall enrich the existing scholarship about birth. After summing up the legal situation, provision of health care in Czechia, and description of main stakeholders, the stress will be put on two – so far neglected, yet crucially important – features of respective public debate and perceptions of women who decided to deliver their baby at home. The first one will focus on questioning the existing media and political discussion and its stress on mothers´ individual characteristics as explanatory variables; the questionnaire survey we conducted – and whose findings will be reflected and interpreted in the context of interviews – revealed that the reasons why women decide for home births are their dissatisfaction with health care provided in maternity hospitals. The second aspect – which has not been addressed in the scholarship yet – focuses on “being silent” as a reaction to public contestation: in the interviews we conducted, it became clear that women are reluctant to talk about unpleasant experiences of home birth or the pressure they feel from failure because they do not perceive it as appropriate. Both these features reveal how impossible understanding in the debate is. The chapter will benefit from a rich dataset that was gathered during a three-year project, particularly from a large questionnaire survey conducted in autumn 2020 covering the experiences of 642 women who gave birth at home between 2015 and 2020 and nine biography interviews conducted with women who delivered their babies at home. The data and their analysis have not been yet published.