“…Cultural and societal values, and their influence on women's pregnancy and childbirth transitions, wellbeing and equity in wellbeing, are often taken for granted and align with the perspective that "what is must be best" (McNeill & Reiger, 2015, p. 11). During pregnancy and childbirth, first-time mothers experienced many regulating discourses of good mothering and assumptions of contemporary Western patriarchal motherhood (Baker, 2014;O'Reilly, 2012O'Reilly, , 2016, which have also been referred to as rules of maternity (Purvis, 2017). Perhaps one of the strongest cultural expectations experienced by first-time mothers was that, as biological mothers, they were the best person to care for their baby, particularly in the early postnatal period (Anderson et al, 2018;Baker, 2014;T.…”