What Do Women Want?: Issues of Choice, Control, and Class in Pregnancy and Childbirth

Although many women in the United States speak about childbirth as a natural process, to differing degrees they accept and often prefer a medicalized birth. This article analyzes issues of choice and control related to women's desire for and access to knowledge about childbirth in light of adva...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Medical anthropology quarterly 1994-03, Vol.8 (1), p.25-46
Main Author: Lazarus, Ellen S.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biomedical technology
Birth
Cesarean section
Childbirth
Choices
Class
Control
Females
Homelessness
human reproduction
Medical anthropology
medical hegemony
medical knowledge
Medical personnel
Middle Class
Natural childbirth
Obstetrics
Physicians
Pregnancy
social class
Social Factors
Women
Womens health
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Although many women in the United States speak about childbirth as a natural process, to differing degrees they accept and often prefer a medicalized birth. This article analyzes issues of choice and control related to women's desire for and access to knowledge about childbirth in light of advanced technology and with constraints imposed by medical institutions, medical ideology, and social class. In a comparison among three groups, lay middle-class women, health professionals who are also middle-class, and poor women, research findings showed that lay middle-class women held a wide range of views about technological birth. Most of these women were concerned with making choices that would allow them to have some control over the course of their pregnancies and over childbirth. To facilitate control, they often chose a physician, in part, to serve as their advocate within the medical system. Middle-class health professionals, also concerned with control, used their knowledge of the system as a way of maintaining that control. On the other hand, poor women neither expected nor desired control but were more concerned with continuity of care.
ISSN:0745-5194
1548-1387
DOI:10.1525/maq.1994.8.1.02a00030