Reproducing the Womb: Images of Childbirth in Science, Feminist Theory, and Literature

Adams, Alice. Reproducing the Womb: Images of Childbirth in Science, Feminist Theory, and Literature. Ithaca & London: Cornell U Press, 1994.

Of immediate relevance,

Chapter 4, "The Birth Machine: Cyborg Mother"
 Commenting on "active management" of delivery as reported by Kieran O'Driscoll et al. at the National Maternity Hospital in Dublin, where cervical dilation is measured against an ideal pattern and medically adjusted to fit the pattern: "The body O'Driscoll describes is a cyborg, or rather a cyborg-cervix. At its best, it is an organ functioning with machinelike precision. When it breaks down, it can be 'corrected'" (Adams pp. 51-52). 

 Cites Elizabeth Beines's novel, The Birth Machine (London: Women's Press, 1983) as "a chilling interpretation of the 'active management' paradigm," where one Zelda Harris "unites with the birth machine when she gives birth in a modern hospital" where in a significant sense "she is literally wedded to a technological system of reproduction," married to a scientist experimenting on oral contraception in rats (Adams pp. 53 f.). Adams sees Zelda becoming a cyborg in the sense of Donna Haraway (explicitly cited) in "A Manifesto for Cyborgs" (1985), but Adams and Beines are less upbeat: "Haraway's conception of the cyborg permits a more optimistic interpretation of Zelda's fate. But Zelda's transformation into a cyborg mother is a scene of torture" (Adams pp. 61-62). 

Chapter 9, "Technology and Economy: Metaphors for the Laboring Mother"
 "The obstetric clinic that practices active management is modeled on the same principle as a well-run factory" with "an assembly line pattern of birth"; in this "technological model" if "something goes wrong, the mother's body is to blame. Her body is a machine that has broken down" (Adams pp. 121-22). 

Chapter 13, "The Woman in the Machine: Feminist Writers of Speculative Fiction"
 Discusses in depth Joanna Russ's The Female Man, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, and Suzy McKee Charnas's Motherlines (NYC: Berkeley, 1978),[1] with references to Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex,[2] Kate Wilhelm's Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang,[3] and other works expressing "faith in," moving into the debate over, "the emancipatory potential of reproductive technologies" (quote from Adams p. 185). 

RDE, finishing, 29Dec21