Fateful moments and the categorisation of risk: Midwifery practice and the ever-narrowing window of normality during childbirth (original) (raw)
Related papers
Normal Birth: Contention and Debate in the UK
The Practising midwife
Promoting and facilitating normal childbirth is considered an essential component of the role of the midwife. However, midwives work within parameters defined not only by the regulatory body, but also national agendas, policy and their employer. Public opinion and media influences on the perception of normal birth can prove challenging in its promotion, yet when care and conditions are optimised, experiencing a vaginal birth is a safe physiological event. With a necessity to be jack-of-all-trades placed upon midwives from so many stakeholders, in this first of a 10-part series, we ask whether midwives can balance these demands and actively work to promote normal vaginal birth.
Can maternity care move beyond risk? Implications for midwifery as a profession
British Journal of Midwifery, 2016
Maternal and infant mortality rates are reassuringly low in developed countries. Despite this, birth is increasingly seen as risky by women, health professionals and society in general. In wider society, women are subjected to a litany of risks regarding birth, including sensationalising negative incidents by the media. Within maternity care, both structural and operational factors contribute to heightened risk perceptions. Women are processed through a system where risk-management strategies can take precedence over individualised care as health professionals attempt to protect themselves from implication in adverse outcomes and litigation. This results in increasingly interventionist care, depriving women of psychosocial safety in the birth process. Midwifery, as a profession promoting trust in normal birth, is threatened by this dominant medical model of maternity care and interventionist birth practices. Midwives need to act to reclaim their role in promoting normal birth, while balancing considerations of risk with the principle of woman-centred care.
Countering technocracy: “natural” birth inThe Business of Being BornandCall the Midwife
Feminist Media Studies, 2017
Feminist media studies scholars concur that representations of childbirth in popular media normalize medical domination of maternity care and women's subordination to it. This article aims to fill the gap in the dearth of academic analysis of alternative representations of childbearing by examining the documentary film The Business of Being Born and the BBC TV drama series Call the Midwife. Although they are situated in disparate socio-historical contexts, both productions push against medicalization and present positive images of "natural" childbirth. Business systematically critiques medicalization of birth in the U.S. and presents midwifery-assisted homebirth as the solution. Call counters the dogma of necessary medical attention during childbirth by showing how midwifery dominated during the mid-twentieth century in a London neighborhood. Call also portrays midwives and a physician collaboratively providing maternal care in an impoverished neighborhood. Reviewed together, Business and Call augment each other as the former reveals the contemporary struggles and solutions devised to de-medicalize birth and the latter serves as an example of how homebirths may be supported by medico-midwifery collaboration in an urban community.
Resistance and Possibility: The Struggle to Preserve Normal Birth
Women's Health Bulletin, 2014
Lowering high cesarean birth rates in favour of normal vaginal birth has a number of implications for health policy, practice and maternity caregiver education. For instance: investing resources for settings which encourage normal birth; developing structures for auditing unnecessary cesarean births and finally, bolstering the role of the registered midwife as the known primary caregiver for all low risk births.
The Birth I Want': Negotiating the Ideal and the Practical in Natural Birth
2018
This thesis explores the disjunction between a public, moralised discourse of natural birth and women's own more complex narratives of practical decision making and lived experience. I focus on women's negotiations of these two dimensions, which I term 'the work of birth', which includes the planning, preparation and practice in which some women are involved during their pregnancies. I argue that this work can be considered an ethical self-formation in which women work on the self in order to construct and present a particular subjectivity - of the good and responsible mother. I address questions which are not adequately answered in the sociology of childbirth literature, including how and why some women become involved in natural birth groups; why they consider investing time and money in antenatal education as a good thing to do; and why they report the need to practice for a natural birth. I approach their natural birth practices as things of 'value' or &#...
Midwives, medicine and natural births
Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies
This article examines how the often juxtaposed concepts 'natural birth' and 'medically assisted birth' figure in Jordemødrene, Barnmorskorna and En unge i minuten: three Scandinavian documentary programmes depicting midwifery and childbirth. Through comparisons between US and UK birthing shows, the study considers the socio-historically specific construction of birthing practices and the figure of the midwife. Non-invasive approaches to labour are celebrated as symbols of an essential 'women's culture' that asserts female agency, but medical technology and pain medication also figure as potential tools for female empowerment, thus rendering the midwife a malleable figurehead for multiple strands of feminism.
2019
This thesis presents the findings of an original study that explored NHS midwives practice of facilitating women’s alternative physiological birthing choices - defined in this study as ‘birth choices that go outside of local/national maternity guidelines or when women decline recommended treatment of care, in the pursuit of a physiological birth’. The premise for this research relates to dominant sociocultural-political discourses of medicalisation, technocratic, risk-averse and institutionalisation that has shaped childbirth practices in the UK. For midwives working in the NHS, sociocultural-political and institutional constraints can negatively impact their ability to provide care to women making alternative birth choices. A meta-ethnography was carried out, highlighting a paucity of literature in this area. Therefore, the aim of this study was to generate practice-based knowledge to answer the broad research question: ‘what are the processes, experiences, and sociocultural-politi...