Compteting Ideologies of Reproduction: Medical and Meternal Perspective on Pregnancy

Abstract

This chapter describes the main features of the two frames of reference and discusses some of the ways in which differences between them are displayed in antenatal consultations and in women's experiences of having a baby. Women's thinking about childbirth has been 'medicalised' for over a century in the sense in which Jocelyn Cornwell uses that term to mean that their lay beliefs have over the years been affected by, and in part derive from, medical teaching and behaviour. The former concepts derive from individual experience and also from shared knowledge and understanding among women; the latter derive from a masculinist science and treatment processes developed historically by male obstetricians. The mismatch between the women and their obstetricians reported for both the London and the York samples is associated with what are basically different systems of knowledge.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 71 citations exist upstream.