A technology of care: Caregiver response to perinatal loss

SynopsisHighly technologized care of pregnancy and childbirth, both lauded and vilified, has also seeded a countermovement of high-touch perinatal care. Employing a feminist symbolic interactionist account, this article examines the relationship between high technology and caregiver response in the high-touch care of dying or dead babies and the grief experienced by their mothers. Recognizing the distancing effects technology has on both caregiver–patient and mother–baby relationships, caregivers engaged in a countermovement of high-touch and thus repositioned themselves closer to women's experiences where they were better able to meet women's needs. When technology brings unfavourable consequences humans can, in their innovation and concern for others, reposition themselves in relation to technology, thereby modifying those unfavourable consequences.