ABSTRACT
MIDWIVES WHO QUALIFIED of the words ‘labour’ and ‘progress’ is axiomatic. In fact, a defining feature of the last fifty years of labour care has been the preoccupation with the pathology of labour length, so much so that it has become an orthodoxy in intrapartum approaches across the world. In the vast majority of hospital birth, progress is assessed by vaginal examination and the procedure has become synonymous with contemporary labour care. This normative mindset is so powerful that few midwives have had the opportunity to observe labours where no vaginal examinations occur. As a midwife recently commented, ‘We have got ourselves into a situation where it’s almost as though women cannot deliver without regular vaginal examinations!’ As practitioners of childbirth, we are blinded to some extent by the era we live in. It is difficult for us to appreciate that for millions of years on the planet, childbirth was not so obsessed with labour duration. Gaskin (2003) reminds us of that in her uncovering of the word ‘pasmo’, meaning labour stopped and everybody went home until it started again. She discovered it in a nineteenth-century Portuguese textbook on midwifery.
