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Midwifery and the Medicalization of Childbirth

Author: Edwin R. Van Teijlingen

Publisher: Nova Publishers

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 9781594540318

This book provides an introduction to the sociological study of midwifery. The readings have been selected to highlight the interplay between midwifery and medicine, reflecting the medicalization of childbirth. It highlights the major themes in both a historical and a current context, as well as western and non-western societies. Two major themes underlie the organization of this book: that the conception of midwifery must be broadened to encompass a sociological perspective; and that the ongoing trend toward the medicalization of midwifery is crucial to an understanding of the historical, current, and future status of midwifery. By medicalization of childbirth and midwifery the author mean the increasing tendency for women to prefer a hospital delivery to a home delivery, the increasing trend toward the use of technology and clinical intervention in childbirth, and the determination of medical practitioners to confine the role played by midwives in pregnancy and childbirth, if any, to a purely subordinate one.

Pushing in Silence

Author: Isabel M. Córdova

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2017-12-20

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1477314121

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As Puerto Rico rapidly industrialized from the late 1940s until the 1970s, the social, political, and economic landscape changed profoundly. In the realm of heath care, the development of medical education, new medical technologies, and a new faith in science radically redefined childbirth and its practice. What had traditionally been a home-based, family-oriented process, assisted by women and midwives and "accomplished" by mothers, became a medicalized, hospital-based procedure, "accomplished" and directed by biomedical, predominantly male, practitioners, and, ultimately reconfigured, after the 1980s, into a technocratic model of childbirth, driven by doctors' fears of malpractice suits and hospitals' corporate concerns. Pushing in Silence charts the medicalization of childbirth in Puerto Rico and demonstrates how biomedicine is culturally constructed within regional and historical contexts. Prior to 1950, registered midwives on the island outnumbered registered doctors by two to one, and they attended well over half of all deliveries. Isabel M. Córdova traces how, over the next quarter-century, midwifery almost completely disappeared as state programs led by scientifically trained experts and organized by bureaucratic institutions restructured and formalized birthing practices. Only after cesarean rates skyrocketed in the 1980s and 1990s did midwifery make a modest return through the practices of five newly trained midwives. This history, which mirrors similar patterns in the United States and elsewhere, adds an important new chapter to the development of medicine and technology in Latin America.

Lying-in

Author: Richard W. Wertz

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1989-01-01

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 9780300040876

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This lively history of childbirth begins with colonial days, when childbirth was a social event, and moves on to the gradual medicalization of childbirth in America as doctors forced midwives out of business and to the home-birth movement of the 1980's. Widely praised when it was first published in 1977, the book has now been expanded to bring the story up to date. In a new chapter and epilogue, Richard and Dorothy Wertz discuss the recent focus on delivering perfect babies, with its emphasis on technology, prenatal testing, and Caesarean sections. They argue that there are many viable alternatives--including out-of-hospital births--in the search for the best birthing system. Review of the first edition: "Highly readable, extensively documented, and well illustrated...A welcome addition to American social history and women's studies. It can also be read with profit by health planners, hospital administrators, 'consumers' of health care, and all those who are concerned with improving the circumstances associated with childbirth."--Claire Elizabeth Fox, bulletin of the History of Medicine "A fascinating, brilliantly documented history not merely of childbirth, but of men's attitudes towards women, the effect of a burgeoning medical profession on our very conception of maternity and motherhood, and the influence of religion on medical technology and science."--Thomas J. Cottle, Boston Globe "This superb book...is both an impeccably documented recitation of the chronological history of medical intervention in American childbirth and a sociological analysis of the various meanings given to childbirth by individuals, interested groups, and American society as a whole."--Barbara Howe, American Journal of Sociology Richard W. Wertz, a builder in Westport, Massachusetts, is formerly an associate professor of American history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dorothy C. Wertz, is a research professor at the School of Public Health, Boston University

The Medicalization of Birth and Death

Author: Lauren K. Hall

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Published: 2019-12-17

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 1421433338

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The Medicalization of Birth and Death is required reading for academics, patients, providers, policymakers, and anyone else interested in how policy shapes healthcare options and limits patients and providers during life's most profound moments.

Entering the World

Author: Michel Odent

Publisher: New Amer Library

Published: 1984

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13: 9780452256286

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A French doctor discusses the removal of technological barriers between mother and child during birth and describes his hospital's natural childbirth techniques

Midwives and Medical Men

Author: Jean Donnison

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-02-01

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1000853152

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Originally published in 1977 and as a second edition in 1988, this book introduces the reader to the women at the top of the midwifery profession up until the 17th Century who attended the aristocracy and Royalty. The author shows how their successors were gradually driven out of the better paid work until in the middle of the 19th Century it appeared that attendance on childbearing women would inevitably become the male monopoly it has virtually become in North America. This downward trend was reversed, thanks to efforts to preserve for women the choice of female attendance in childbirth and also to the labour of philanthropists to improve maternity services to the poor. However, the drive for the institutionalization and mechanization of childbirth during the 20th Century as well as a chronic shortage of midwives, has once again shone a spotlight on the profession. This unique history of developments in midwifery will be of interest to students of medical politics, 19th Century social history, the sociology of the professions and gender studies.

The Midwives' Guide to Key Medical Conditions

Author: Linda Wylie

Publisher: Elsevier Health Sciences

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 0443103879

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Collects relevant clinical information on common medical problems that can affect the pregnancy. This book covers conditions as diverse as epilepsy, lupus, diabetes and HIV. It is suitable for all health professionals dealing with childbearing women.

Brought to Bed

Author: Judith Walzer Leavitt

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1988-11-10

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 019028160X

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Based on personal accounts by birthing women and their medical attendants, Brought to Bed reveals how childbirth has changed from colonial times to the present. Judith Walzer Leavitt's study focuses on the traditional woman-centered home-birthing practices, their replacement by male doctors, and the movement from the home to the hospital. She explains that childbearing women and their physicians gradually changed birth places because they believed the increased medicalization would make giving birth safer and more comfortable. Ironically, because of infection, infant and maternal mortality did not immediately decline. She concludes that birthing women held considerable power in determining labor and delivery events as long as childbirth remained in the home. The move to the hospital in the twentieth century gave the medical profession the upper hand. Leavitt also discusses recent events in American obstetrics that illustrate how women have attempted to retrieve some of the traditional women--and family--centered aspects of childbirth.