Maternal tasks of uncertain motherhood.

A longitudinal, phenomenological study was carried out to gain understanding of what it was like for women to be in a high-risk perinatal situation. Twenty-seven women participated in the study during which focused, unstructured interviews were conducted throughout their experience. Hermeneutic methods were applied to the 174 interviews and 13 diaries collected. A serendipitous finding revealed that women in high-risk situations work on the same developmental tasks as described by Rubin in 1975. However, these tasks are altered by the uncertainty of attaining motherhood inherent in the high-risk situation. The alterations in the tasks are described in this paper. The importance of Rubin's work as basic clinical research for maternity nursing is underlined by this finding.