A Brief Overview of How Male Medicine Co-Opted the Midwife’s Role in the Birth Process

Abstract

The term medicalization has been defined as the process by which non-medical issues come to be defined and treated as medical problems. There are no better examples of this than pregnancy and childbirth. Prior to the intervention of physicians and hospitals, most females delivered unassisted or assisted by a relative or a midwife who usually had no formal education. As long as this remained the practice, pregnancy could not become a medical procedure. Through systematic changes, discussed in detail herein, this primarily female-oriented event involving family and amateur aids would come to be dominated by males who were the sole legally authorized providers of obstetrical care [1]. The increasing cultural authority of medicine facilitated the transfer of home delivery to hospital delivery and changed normal birth into a surgical procedure. This paper will examine the history of obstetrics and how a profession comes to redefine a normal life event as a disease state.

Competing Values Framework: A useful tool to define the predominant culture in a maternity setting in Australia

“…The overall results of this study indicate a lack of readiness to change but a strong preference from respondents for the culture to be different. Tensions have also been historically evident in maternity care between obstetricians and midwives where professional boundaries have become territorial and fiercely contested 25,[43][44][45] . In Foucauldian terms, the scientific knowledge of childbirth was traditionally held by obstetricians and hence professional power was held by them to the exclusion of other disciplines and in particular midwifery 46 .…”