Kommunikative Beteiligung von Partnern in der Schwangerenberatung

Abstract The interaction between midwifes or other medical professionals and pregnant women in the last trimester of pregnancy plays an important role during antenatal care and birth. The partners of the pregnant women are often present for these conversations and can affect the interaction with their contributions, e. g. their input to the birth plan and their experiences during pregnancy. In this interactional work, triadic interactions during antenatal care consultations were analysed. Using examples from a corpus of 37 primary consultations between midwifes, pregnant women and doctors in an obstetric ward, it is shown that partners can affect the information exchange during these interactions. With their utterances, partners can provide various information, such as facts about previous deliveries, information about the pregnant woman, own pregnancy experiences, information about past abortions and miscarriages as well as information about congenital diseases. In doing so, they enriched the conversation and provided emotional support for the pregnant woman. Only very few partners acted in the role of ‘critic’ or ‘opponent’ and controlled the informational exchange between midwife and pregnant woman or focused solely on themselves during these interactions.