How can we conceptualise birthing care ethics across a bifurcated South African health care system? This talk explores what we call technologies of motherhood in the experiences of women in Cape Town using both the public and private healthcare sector. The South African society is grappling with how to provide effective equitable health care to those who give birth to the future population of the country. Maternal health care is about making individual futures but also collective ones - about birthing futures.

The state provides free maternity care in a primary healthcare framework that functions side-by-side with some of the world’s most expensive private healthcare. Our research examines maternal reproductive experiences in both the public sector and the private sector. We argue that maternal reproductive experiences are produced by different sets of discursive, spatial and material caring relations that emerge on either side of a binary maternity system, which are productive of these self-same differences. We trace the performative production of difference with ‘technologies of motherhood’ that endorse and construct mothering-selves as they emerge from the site of their interaction with the maternal healthcare system. However, these technologies are also resisted in day-to-day caring practices, lived lives and research arrangements. Using an ethics of care framework we identify configurations of motherhood that emerge in both reproductive governance and scholarly works, and suggest that attention to technologies of motherhoods across binaries allows for the construction of futures of plural motherhoods.