Choose a decade or interesting time period and explore the role of midwives, nurse-midwives and other women’s healthcare providers. Address the following questions: Who predominantly provided care to women?
Choose a decade or interesting time period and explore the role of midwives, nurse-midwives and other women’s healthcare providers. Address the following questions: Who predominantly provided care to women? What were the geographic influences? (Did rough terrain prevent women from having access to care?)
Have there been political obstacles? Were there historical barriers (was there a war or other large event occurring)? What were the social influencers? Were there cultural influencers? You may need to conduct interviews or search historical records at the hospital, historical society, or library in addition to finding journal and newspaper articles to support your claims. Present your findings in a short (<10 minute) PowerPoint presentation voice-over recorded in Kaltura. Share in the Discussion Board and upload as an assignment. Follow the rubric in the syllabus.
More details;
In the United States, most births occur in hospitals, with physicians, mainly obstetricians, attending. In 2012, 98.6% of all births took place in hospitals, with nearly 92 percent attended by physicians.
But in many other wealthy industrialized countries, including the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Japan, midwives attend most births and far outnumber obstetricians. The difference has its roots in history. Midwives attended almost all births in the American colonies, practicing from their homes and passing the skills they had brought from Britain from one woman to another informally.
West African midwives came to America as slaves and attended the births of both black and white women in the antebellum South. After emancipation, African-American midwives continued to take care of both black and white poor women in most rural parts of the South, where they were referred to as “granny midwives.” American Indian tribes had their own birth traditions.
Unlike in Europe and the British Isles, where midwifery laws were national, in America, midwifery laws were local and varied widely. With few midwifery schools, laws requiring education couldn’t be enforced; with few doctors positioned or willing to attend poor women, it wasn’t practical to outlaw midwives. Midwives in most states practiced without government control until the 1920s. Even today, regulation of midwifery varies from state to state.
Medicine did not become professionalized in the U.S. until the last half of the 1800s. When it did, it did so in a spirit of competition. By the beginning of the 20th century, midwives attended only about half of all births in the U.S., and physicians attended the other half.
A series of events between 1910 and 1920 set the stage for doctors to usurp the traditional role of the midwife and laid the foundation for a pathology-oriented medical model of childbirth in this country.
Two reports on medical education, published in 1910 and 1912, concluded that America’s obstetricians were poorly trained. To improve obstetrics training, one report recommended hospitalization for all deliveries and the gradual abolition of midwifery. Rather than consult with midwives, the report argued, poor women should attend charity hospitals, which would serve as sites for training doctors.
Just two years later, in 1914, “twilight sleep” was introduced. Twilight sleep was induced through a combination of morphine, for relief of pain, and scopolamine, an amnesiac that caused women to have no memories of giving birth. Upper-class women initially welcomed it as a symbol of medical progress, although its negative effects were later publicized.