Turning the Board Blue: America's Epiduralized System of Birth. A Medical Ethnography

<p>This dissertation is a medical ethnography of a nurse-midwifery hospital-based maternity service in an urban American hospital. The research study incorporates on-site observation, interviews, and data collection. The recent transformation of American hospital childbirth is described. Epiduralized birth has become the norm, representing a standardization of the cascade of interventions so often referred to by critics of the system of hospital birth in the United States. The routine use of the epidural has led to a Gleichschaltung of birth where the centrality of the epidural makes necessary a unitary, complex, totalistic set of interventions all of which make up an entirety of interventions that cannot be separated from each other. The policy implications for this fundamental change in American birth are discussed. The history of childbirth and midwifery in the United States is also discussed as well as the culture of the profession of nurse-midwifery. The scientific literature regarding the physiology and ecology of birth, as well as the safety of medications used in epiduralized birth (particularly bupivacaine and pitocin) is analyzed. Finally, the closure of the maternity service observed throughout this ethnographic research is discussed in light of regionalization and centralization of childbirth.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Social Sciences

Year

2014

Author dc:creator

• May, Maureen

Contributors dc:contributor

• Hans Buechler

• Birth
• Childbirth
• Epidural
• History of Childbirth
• Medical Ethnography
• Nurse-Midwifery
• Social and Behavioral Sciences

Repository record dc:identifier

https://surface.syr.edu/etd/164

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:surface.syr.edu:etd-1164