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Haunting Expectations of Hospital Births Challenged by Traditional Midwives

ABSTRACT In Balochistan, Pakistan, hospitals are not the desired location for childbirth, but an affective economy of obstetric care, deceit, and clinical tactics of control has emerged, redirecting women away from midwives toward biomedical obstetrics. This economy manifests in forms such as coercing expectant mothers to deliver in the clinic rather than the home by generating fear in them and their kin through a narrative of imminent maternal and child harm. Drawing from ethnographic research, I show why Baloch midwives’ ethical expertise and affective responses to iatrogenically induced emergencies haunt the postcolonial state and constrain biomedicine’s haunting expectations of hospital/clinical births.