Embodied trust within the perinatal nursing relationship

to explore an experiential understanding of the relationships that perinatal nurses fostered with birthing women within their clinical practices.

a feminist phenomenology provided the methodological framework for the research study.

interviews were conducted with eight perinatal nurses and eight postpartum women from a low-risk obstetrical hospital in Western Canada. Participant observation was also conducted with the eight nurses after their interviews.

embodied trust, one of the major themes reflected in the research, highlighted the ways in which a trusting relationship with a perinatal nurse simultaneously established a birthing woman's self-trust, thus enabling her to develop her own bodily abilities to birth her baby into the world.

because feminist phenomenology takes seriously the embodied practices of the female subject, this research attends to the practices of women and nurses in ways that other non-feminist or non-experiential methods dismiss or reject. Future research is needed, however, to further explore these relationships in other situations, particularly in places of difference. Only then will nurses, midwives and other perinatal health-care providers have the knowledge required to work with women in empowering and embodying ways during their experiences of birth.