When childbirth was medicalized and institutionalized in the West during the early 20th century people raised concerns about the degree to which anesthetics were used. Within that context some obstetricians and midwives began advocating for childbirth without what they considered to be unnecessary anesthetics. They also advocated for obstetricians to start providing young women with fundamental knowledge about how the body functions during pregnancy. Obstetricians hoped that this knowledge would prevent unnecessary fear these young women might otherwise have felt during their pregnancies. This was a key element of their teachings as they believed that fear of childbirth was a contributing factor to labor pains. In this essay I explore three books about pregnancy and childbirth from the perspective of medicalization and phenomenology. I wanted to combine these two theoretical tools since I saw that pregnancy and labor pains brought about a duality connected to medicalization; since pregnancy is medicalized even though it is not considered an illness. Furthermore I explore the way the authors discuss childbirth without anesthetics, which methods they advocate for and how they relate their theories to a bigger narrative. I found that all three authors had strong ideas about gender, medicine, and what role they thought that medicine should play during childbirth. In addition, all authors expressed ideas about the importance of mind and body coherence and how the pregnant woman should work together with the natural flow of the body during labor.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-475333 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Inez, Sigvardson |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för idé- och lärdomshistoria |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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