HIST 249 Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Postpartum Infections, Asepsis, Twilight Sleep
Medicalizing Reproduction: The History of Childbirth
(Guest Lecturer)
• Reading:
o Courepack: Judith Walzer Leavitt: "Science Enters the Birthing Room:
Obstetrics in America since the Eighteenth Century" AND "On Insane Women
and the Reproductive System"
• Guest lecturer
• Why study the history of childbirth:
o 1 human event that effects everyone
o Not everyone will become parents… but 80% of Canadian women are likely to have
at least 1 child
o Birth control - biological, political, social event
o Majority of childbirth is now happening in the hospital…
o Reproduction - should women have legal or medical or finical access to birth control?
Abortion?
o Do people have a right to give birth? Even those who suffer from infertility?
o Role of medicine in modern childbirth (pain relief, midwives, doctors…)
• Medicalization:
o The process by which events and experiences are pushed & pulled into the medical
domain
o Scholars accuse pharmaceutical companies
o Over-medicalization of women's bodies
o Disease/pathology
o Pregnancy is different (not a disease, is a natural event - predated modern medicine)
o Birth control became medicalized because of its success - forced women to go to
their doctors to get a prescription for it
o USA: more women having babies in hospitals
• Why is this so medicalized in the USA
• Social Childbirth
o Judy Leavitt article
o Female event
o Offering help, support, comfort to the pregnant woman
o Midwives likely to attend
o Birth control - don’t have the internet, about word of mouth in order to stop
contraception
• How the history of childbirth has been told has its own history
o Ehrenreich & English -
Witches, midwives, nurses: a history of women nurses
o Women always being healers
find more resources at oneclass.com
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