The Medicalization of Child Birth, Essay Example

Childbirth in Western culture has become a heavily medicalized process. A majority of women in the West no longer experience what it is to deliver their babies without interference. Almost all of them give birth in hospitals and are made to go through a cascade of technological and medical interventions during pregnancy and birth. During childbirth, medicalization entails practices such as cesarean section, epidural anesthesia, recumbent birthing position, artificial rupture of membranes, electronic fetal monitoring, and episiotomy (Davis?Floyd 29). These practices have achieved high levels of efficacy and have reduced the infant mortality rate. These practices have replaced the traditional birthing practices in which domestic women were heavily relied on mainly on the basis of their first-hand experience by virtue of having given birth themselves. The rapid growth of the medical science field in the West during the 19^th century led to a situation where traditional birthing processes diminished and the midwives got replaced by medical doctors. Towards the end of the 17^th century, the argument in the obstetric field was that the hospitals are the safest places to deliver babies, and this has become part of the Western culture where the hospital birth rate estimated at 97-99% (Lazarus 42). The idea behind the medicalization of childbirth is that the female body can always fail and that childbirth is a highly risky affair. Therefore, a majority of women opt for a medicalized childbirth because they believe that hospitals offer the environment for safe motherhood. Research, however, indicates that when the pregnancy is normal, a planned homebirth can be very safe. The position of this argumentative essay is that whereas medicalization of childbirth is highly efficacious, there is need to develop policy measures which allow for the positive natural childbirth practices such as preventive care, guidance from the doulas, and proven breathing exercises prior to enforcing the medical options.

A majority of women opt for a hospital birth because they were made to believe that it is the safest. Medicalization practice has largely been perpetuated by doctors who are believed to have great power and influence over people. By virtue of their immense power and influence, the doctors have had a traditional capacity to manipulate and control the belief systems of people and societies regarding childbirth (Trostle 92). This has become referred to as ‘medical imperialism’. Today, the pharmaceutical industry has increased medicalization of childbirth even more than doctors through the creation of several disease categories with the primary aim of profiteering. Most of the reports that have been released recently on the subject of medicalized childbirth have revolved around the idea of ‘choice’ in the maternity field, arguing that medicalization of childbirth is mainly based on the choices women make. However, research has revealed that the idea of choice is an illusion and is, in fact, not the single most important factor considered when it comes to childbirth (Young 140). Women’s preference for medicalized childbirth has resulted from the presentation of medical and technological intervention as routine as well as encouraging them to make better choices for their babies. Therefore, it is easy to see why, for a long time now, a majority of women in the Western context have increasingly preferred the medical to the traditional model of childbirth.

Today, hospital birth is prevalent in almost all cultural contexts. Medically-assisted delivery, with a prevalence rate of 97-99% in the Western culture, entails a number of practices which include amniotomy, induced labor, episiotomy, fetal monitoring, vacuum extraction, forceps delivery, and caesarian section. The procedure that doctors choose among the listed ones usually depends on the conditions that arise during labor (Young 116).  For a straightforward and uncomplicated labor process, vaginal delivery is preferred, and this is where traditional birthing applies. For traditional childbirth, however, midwives have ways of dealing with complicated labor. Doulas are birth partners who, in most cases, are experienced mothers who offer practical and emotional support during both pregnancy and labor. With a good support system, traditional childbirth registered a high success rate. For difficult and complicated labor in traditional homebirth, midwives deal with the situation by staying calm and trusting their judgment so as not to make any mistakes during the delicate process. They relied on their extensive experience and wide-ranging skills to help achieve successful birth in different kinds of labor situations (Kline 79). Since the 1940s, the natural childbirth has reemerged strongly across Europe due to the belief that the drugs that doctors used during deliveries tended to have a negative emotional impact on the newborn and also made it difficult to achieve ‘happy’ childbirth.

The second wave of the feminist movement during the 1970s called for the demedicalization of childbirth. Traditional feminists have argued that natural childbirth devoid of application of medical technology allows women to actively participate and have maximum control of the birthing process (Baer 97). They recognize the importance of a birth setting being safe but are opposed to hospital setting because it tempts women to have medical technologies such as epidurals to be applied to them. Feminists are categorical that natural birth is normal and must take place in a home setting with the use of midwives. Natural birth advocates believe that caesarian section does not allow women reasonable control over their own bodies, and this leads to anxiety which reduces their natural capacity for childbirth (Farmer 148). The increasing prevalence of caesarian section, according to feminists, reflects the rising power of masculinist medicine which promotes alienation and disempowerment of women and takes away their control over their own bodies.

A less common birthing process is water birth which also takes place mostly in a home setting and involves women delivering their newborns in a tub of warm water. Water birth is based on the belief that it is a less painful and more relaxed process. Like natural home birth, water birth also takes the midwife-led care model (Hunter 323). Other than the soothing, relaxing, and comforting aspect, water birth is believed to have benefits such as reducing stress-related hormones, lowering high blood pressure that often results from anxiety, increasing the woman’s energy, and lowering the mother’s weight to allow for new positioning and free movement. Risks associated with water birth include water embolism and the chances of the newborn inhaling water when the umbilical cord becomes twisted in the process or the baby experiences stress while still in the birth canal.

Medicalization of birth has been part of the Western culture since towards the end of the 17^th century. The mass acceptance of medicalized childbirth resulted from the rationalization of society. The West broadly embraced technology and science not only as value-free but also superior to the old, traditional ways (Kline 102). People also believed that the advancement of science and technology was inherently beneficial to humans. As a result, the Western world accepted medical models of controlling and intervening in birth as the safest and easiest way of managing birth. Therefore, science and technology triumphed over nature. Several feminist writers such as opined that the patriarchal organization of Western society is what facilitated the rise medicalization of birth. Women need assistance during childbirth due to the many structural changes that happen to the body while in an upright position (Davis?Floyd 132). The pelvic region of a woman tends to make childbirth difficult and sometimes a dangerous affair, hence the necessity for the birthing process to be medically assisted so that it is safe in the end.

The belief system in Western culture revolves around science and technology on nearly every aspect of human life. Also, the medical system in the West is more profit-oriented than anywhere else in the world (Kline 122). This belief system contributes immensely to the medicalization of childbirth in Western culture. The human body is generally perceived to be a machine than as a natural being. The medicalization process takes what is thought to be nonmedical and normal and defines it within the ambit of the medical environment. Childbirth is essentially a natural process that is as old as humankind, but the developing perception in the Western culture that the human body is a machine that is in an imperfect condition makes it necessary for the birthing processes to be assisted by specialists (Davis?Floyd 146). The hospital environment contains health professionals and technicians who have adequate knowledge and proper training to help the human body go through the birthing process safely.  The health professionals have separated the labor process into distinct stages, each one of which takes a given amount of time under normal circumstances. If things do not proceed normally, the medical professions intervene swiftly through specific medical procedures.

The traditional birthing process is based on the idea that the uterus of a woman is designed in such a way that it is able to do all the work by itself and the mother’s system is simply made to make automatic responses that aid the whole process. The medical model in the West holds the same belief but goes a step further to put in place elaborate measures which can be taken where the process is not normal (Trostle 108). The opponents of medicalized birth, especially feminists, argue that the model ignores the fundamental view that the whole birthing process is natural and should be given enough time and not rushed in order to be successful. The opponents further believe that childbirth is not only about the body, but also the two people involved, that is, the mother and the baby. Medicalization of birth in the Western world largely limits the capacity of mothers to make personal choices as it makes them highly dependable on the medical system for safe delivery (Lupton 66). The primary focus is on the body, which explains why the training that the health professionals get discourages them from making the childbirth appear to be the social affair that it is. The available birthing technological components help to make the birthing process manageable and save both the mother and the baby in the event that complications occur along the way. Some of the components include forceps, suction cup, electronic fetal monitoring, caesarian, and anesthetics.

Canada is one of the countries whose medical systems make it almost mandatory for women to have hospitalized births. Medicalization of birth in Canada is so fundamental that it is covered in the Canadian public healthcare to impress upon mothers to embrace it. While it seems to be an integral component of the Canadian culture, it could be argued that the Canadian society takes away the power of mothers to decide by having in place a rigid and hegemonic regime (Young 142). This is evidenced by the near total absence of traditional techniques such as the doulas. The territory of medical expertise in Canada has been expanding so rapidly since the 1800s that by 1900, the midwives played little to no role in childbirth within the Canadian setting, except in very remote locations that lacked medical facilities. While the hospital experience is largely male-dominated, midwifery was a preserve for women who had extensive experience with birthing processes (Lazarus 42). The problem that emerges from compulsory medicalized birth in the Canadian setting is that it completely abrogates the right of mothers to have a birthing process of their choice, and this borders on violation of their fundamental rights in a free Canadian society. While the intention is to ensure that births occur safely, the fact that it is not based on choice makes women appear helpless in the face of the policy.

That the medical birthing interventions and procedures in the Western setting have been effective in ensuring that the entire process is protected cannot be gainsaid. Almost everyone, including the feminist opponents, agrees that medicalized birth has been highly efficacious (Young 62). A number of complications could occur during childbirth, including breech position, fetal distress, nuchal cord, cephalopelvic disproportion, meconium aspiration, and placenta previa. These complications are not unique to the era of medical science and technology. They must have existed when midwifery was rife, and the midwives had ways of dealing with them, many times successfully and other times unsuccessfully (van Teijlingen 369). The difference between traditional and medical birthing models is that while the former is based purely on the experience of midwives, the latter is based on formal curriculum-based training and is, therefore, more standardized. Using medical science and technology, infant mortality has been reduced to bare minimum and the mothers are safer (Lupton 169). An example is the situation of premature birth where the baby’s survival chances were minimal but with the advent of incubators, the survival odds are higher. Since medicalized birth has been seen to address the safety concerns, a majority of mothers choose it over the traditional birthing models and this offers justification to compulsory hospitalized birth in countries like Canada that make it part of public healthcare.

Medicalization of birth is not entirely a bad thing, and this is based on the fact that the world is moving fast in the direction of technology in numerous aspects of human lives. However, when childbirth is overmedicalized, it denies mothers the opportunity to experience birth (Young 69). It is important to note that midwifery is still a common practice in a lot of European nations. In the United Kingdom, more than 50% of the newborns are delivered with the assistance of midwives, while in the Scandinavian countries, it is nearly three quarters, which levels that of France. In a vast majority of European countries, midwives are involved in almost all deliveries as they can also offer assistance to obstetricians and gynecologists in complicated childbirth situations. It is safe to say that in Europe, generally, there is parity between the natural and medical models of birth, and this is attributable to the conservative nature of the European people when it comes to the cultural issue of childbirth.

In the United States and Canada, barely 10% of the births are assisted by midwives, and this has been the case since more than a century ago when pregnant mothers developed a preference for doctor-led birth due to its perceived safety and efficacy (Davis?Floyd 158). The child delivery business in the US is characterized by distrust between the midwives and the OB-GYNs for the simple reason of business competition. The distrust can be traced back to the early 1900s when the American doctors were looked down upon due to their incompetency resulting from lack of medical education. The doctors responded by embarking on a campaign to professionalize their practice and improve the standards of the services they offered through the application of relevant technology. It is in the wake of this campaign that the culture of physician-assisted birth started to spread across North America. Tools such as forceps were often used to speed up labor. Over time, it was recommended that midwifery be phased out in rural and urban America to pave way for medicalized birth (Young 73). This explains why the prevalence of physician-assisted birth in North America stands at 97-99%.

A cross-cultural examination of birthing techniques concentrates on the traditional and medical birthing models. It is important to note from the outset that medicalization of birth is today not confined to the Western culture. Healthcare in traditional African societies was enhanced in the 20th century (Baer 97). Today, a majority of African mothers prefer hospital birth to the traditional midwifery model, but the latter has not been completely phased out as it is still a norm in the conservative settings. The traditional model has numerous advantages. One obvious advantage is that it grants women the power of choice. Women are in control where childbirth is viewed as a natural process that involves the mother and the child primarily (Farmer 88). With a high degree of control, women are better able to understand the changes their bodies go through in all the birthing stages and learn to respond to the changes to yield successful childbirth. Since birthing takes place in the body of a woman, it is only fair that they are granted the right to be in control of the entire process and if any interventions are to be necessary due to complications, mothers should be in a position to allow or disallow it.

The medical model has replaced the traditional one to a large extent in almost all cultural settings. Based on advances in science and technology, the medical model combines traditional and modern concepts and beliefs (Baer 98). The core traditional belief that has been retained in the traditional birthing regime is the idea that childbirth is a natural process that should take place normally with minimal intervention of a healthcare professional (Farmer 107). The advantage of the medical model is that it offers sophisticated and efficient solutions where serious complications were to be experienced. A lot of people choose the medical model because of the mystery and uncertainty that surrounds the birthing process. People tend to be unsure about how the process would go and thus prefer the intervention of trained professionals during not just childbirth, but from as early as the opening weeks of pregnancy (Kline 121). Using technology, it has become a lot easier to monitor all these processes and offer quick solutions to challenges that may be experienced. The main misgiving opponents of medicalized birth have is that it makes childbirth excessively dependent on technology, so much that it takes away the natural belief and capacity of women to deliver babies naturally where medical technology may be absent.

There are a number of advantages, mental and general, of allowing women to be in control of the childbirth processes. Medicalization of birth takes away a women’s control of the natural process (Davis?Floyd 74). Medicalization has led a scenario where women have completely surrendered their natural power and intrinsic capacity to technology, so much that they tend to be largely skeptical about how their childbirth would unfold. Allowing women to control the process gives them the mental strength to withstand labor and go through the entire process without the intervention of technology (Trostle 28). The problem with conceding to science and technology is that mothers will tend to develop extreme stress where they cannot access a medical facility immediately, such as in several African settings where hospitals are located too far away and mothers have to deliver their babies by the roadside. A medicalized birth script turns mothers into slaves of technology and reduces their mental strength. The natural birthing process is important because the women are able to exercise full control of a biological process that was intended by God to take place entirely naturally (Hunter 323). The reliance on doulas and midwives makes sense because they form part of a support system that adds to the mental strength and encourages the mothers to exercise full control of a process that takes place in their bodies.

The issue of birthing rights has been rife over the last couple of centuries, with different groups pulling in opposite directions on the subject of medicalized birth. Medicalization of birth both in the Western and non-Western societies rose so rapidly that the agitations of those opposed to it did little in anything to stop it. Over time, it became a reality that it takes away the women’s right to make personal choices during childbirth, then a feminist wave developed to try to advocate for natural childbirth model (Lupton 128). Women are generally unaware of the extent that medicalized birth affects them psychologically till after they deliver their babies when they realize just how much it is difficult to deal with the pressures that come with motherhood, especially in the case of first-time mothers. Postpartum depression and anxiety tend to set in mothers moments after childbirth and this negatively affects their relationship with their own newborns. They develop a feeling of helplessness and are heavily dependent. In such a situation, both the newborn and the mother suffer (van Teijlingen 369). If the mother were to be granted rights right from the first stage of childbirth, they would on their own develop an understanding of how to handle the changes that occur during childbirth and smoothly transition to motherhood. It is noteworthy that postpartum depression and anxiety is not unique to first-time mothers.

Picking which between traditional and medical birthing process has greater advantages is an intricate affair considering a number of issues. The first issue is that medicalized birth has proven to be highly efficacious and massively reduced infant mortality. It has also improved the reproductive health of the mothers both before and after childbirth because technology and science have made it possible to tell how these processes unfold (Hunter 319). Through technology, it has become possible to tell whatever risks there might be and to intervene appropriately. However, the one aspect in which medicalized birth fails is the fact that it almost completely abrogates the right of choice of mothers. The aspect of women being able to control the birthing process is extremely vital and under no circumstance should it be overlooked. The only exception is where the mother is deemed to be unable to deal with a childbirth complication that would harm her and the baby (Kline 141).

The pace of technological advancement in the health sector is such that it is impossible to return the world to traditional practices. As time progresses, more and more technology find their way into the sector, and this means that there is little that can be done at this point to stop medicalization of birth trends in countries that embraced it fully such as the United States and Canada. However, the tragedy of this trend is real given the long-term negative effects on women who give up their control to technology during childbirth (Baer 98). The fact that a woman can carry a pregnancy to full term and deal with its challenges means they are strong enough to deal with what comes at the tail-end of it. When it is said that the birthing process is natural, the idea is that if the excessive dependence on technology were not to corrupt the minds of mothers, they should have a natural physical and mental strength to go through the birthing process successfully. An example that suffices is that of the animals in the wild that deliver their offspring successfully without assistance. Humans have that natural capacity too.

Traditional birthing model is good because of its naturalness. It allows nature to take its cause and grants the woman maximum control of the entire process. The traditional model allows mothers to own the process and deal with every stage of it. This way, they have the individual capacity and mental strength to transition to motherhood and deal with the attendant pressures. It eliminates the situation where a new mother develops mental health issues such as postpartum depression and anxiety which reduces their capacity to take care of both herself and the baby (Davis?Floyd 114). On physical health, medicalized birth gets the mothers to be almost entirely dependent on assistance they get from healthcare professionals who rely on products of science and technology. Traditional birthing, on the other hand, allows the woman to deal with all the stages of birthing on their own and develop the kind of physical strength that they need to achieve just that. Therefore, traditional birthing models such as home birth and doulas have greater advantages than the medical one.

In conclusion, allowing women the right to choose their preferred birthing process is of extreme importance. If women were to be allowed to exercise maximum control of this natural process, they would most likely choose a traditional model because the medicalized model makes them surrender completely to technology and science and eliminates their individual control of the process. There is no denying the fact that medicalized birth has helped ensure that childbirth is a much safer affair than in the past. The technology works with precision and with a great deal of efficiency. It helps in finding quick solutions to complex problems that may be experienced in the course of the birthing process. It is, however, vital to consider that the birthing process does not start and stop at delivering the newborn. It extends to motherhood, and the new mothers should be adequately prepared to handle the challenges that come with motherhood. New mothers need the right amount of mental and physical strength, but this, in most cases, is an extrapolation of their mental strength during childbirth. Traditional birthing models such as doulas and home birth allow mothers to do most of the things on their own and prepare them for future roles and challenges. Unlike medicalized birth which perpetuates dependence during and after childbirth, the traditional model promotes independence and gets the mothers to own the process and be in control. The inherent challenges faced with the medicalization of birth could be resolved by viewing midwifery and hospital birth as playing complementary rather than antagonistic roles in the birthing process. This way, it would be possible to appreciate midwifery as an old practice that achieves positive results while also embracing the reality of technology.

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