A salient feature to emerge from professional and popular
culture is an explosion of discourses around the choice of a
caesarean section for no clinical reason. These filter through
a sociopolitical milieu to sculpture out a discursive landscape
from which a plurality of social and disciplinary practices
proclaim preference for how babies are to be born. The
French philosopher Michel Foucault (1972) asserts that the
construction of knowledge comes through discourse and disciplinary
practices. He proposed these ‘truths’ are products
of power relations, inherent within these complexes and are
integral to the status of and entitlement to knowledge.
Meanings to emerge from a particular discourse are typical
of a specific context from which they surfaced and are party
to broader societal thinking at a particular point in time
(Lupton 2003). Meanings therefore change as a function of
time and place.