Writing Childbirth: Women’s Rhetorical Agency in Labor and Online demonstrates the value of Widening the lens of rhetorical investigations of health and medicine beyond the interactions between patients and physicians and the discourse of physicians. Author Kim Hensley Owen draws on medical texts, popular advice books, and online birth plans and birth stories, as well as her own childbirth writing survey, to explore how women create and use every day rhetoric’s to assert agency in planning for, experiencing, and writing about childbirth. Seeking to challenge or expressing concerns about institutionalized medicine, women exercise rhetorical agency in undeniably feminist ways through the writing of birth plans and birth stories.

Owens considers how women’s rhetorical choices in writing interact with institutionalized medicine and societal norms. This book 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.