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In the United States, pregnant people considering a vaginal birth after cesarean delivery (VBAC) face this decision in a highly contested environment where VBAC is simultaneously encouraged—situated within discourses promoting vaginal birth—and discouraged through discourses emphasizing reproductive risk. Woven through these competing discourses is a shared emphasis on maternal responsibility, reflective of a socially constructed belief that birth method is bound implicitly to one's "goodness" as a mother. This paper employs a discursive analytic lens to examine the experiences of 16 pregnant people in New York City seeking VBACs for their upcoming births. We examine how sociocultural discourses of "responsible" mothering shape participants' experiences of considering VBAC and examine participants' anxieties over VBAC and its attainability in light of their past birth experiences. Our analysis demonstrates that participants reproduce discourses privileging vaginal birth, and simultaneously challenge these discourses by invoking an "embodied knowledge" that enables them to assert themselves as responsible mothers in the context of past cesarean deliveries and uncertainty surrounding their upcoming births. Implications are discussed in the context of existing literature on birth and discourses of maternal responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on a body of work over the decades that examines how East Yorkers give and receive support. We go beyond the earlier work taking into consideration communication technologies and how they play a role in the ways people exchange social support across the life course. We draw on 101 in-depth interviews conducted in 2013–2014 to shed light on the support networks of a sample of East York residents and discern the role of communication technologies in the exchange of different types of social support across age groups. Our findings show that not much has changed since the 1960s in terms of the social ties that our sample of East Yorkers have, and the types of support mobilized via social networks: companionship, small and large services, emotional aid, and financial support. What has changed is how communication technologies interweave in complex ways with different types of social ties (partners, siblings, friends, etc.) to mobilize social support. We found that communication technologies helped siblings and extended kin to increase the frequency of interaction and help exchange support at a distance. Communication technologies helped solidify friendship ties by providing a continuous flow of interaction. We draw implications for theories of social support and for social policy associated with interventions aimed at helping vulnerable groups cope in hard times such as the COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]