Relational care as emotional resistance: medicalisation, childbirth, and breastfeeding practices

Health sociologists conceptualise the medicalisation of birth and breastfeeding within broader socio-cultural frameworks of fear and antagonism toward the female body. While birth emotions shape breastfeeding initiation, their longer-term implications and the role of emotional support during childbirth remain less clear. We use survey data from the Hampton Roads Infant Feeding Study (N = 1,360), collected among mothers who gave birth between 2020 and 2024, to estimate a generalised structural equation model linking medical interventions, relational care, emotional responses, and exclusive breastfeeding at six months. Building on Hochschild's theory of emotion work and recent literature on emotional geography and emotional resistance, we show that medicalised birth is associated with breastfeeding partly through negative emotional pathways, while doula and midwife support are associated with positive emotional experiences and higher odds of exclusive breastfeeding. We argue that relational care can function as emotional resistance by supporting embodied confidence and mother-infant connection across birth and infant feeding. Relational care during childbirth may therefore extend beyond the birthing space, not only shaping the emotional conditions for breastfeeding, but potentially also transforming more general normative constructions of womanhood.