ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the critique of medically managed birth and the development, among a small group of educated middle- and upper-middle-class women, of alternative methods of childbirth. In the United States, childbirth has been transformed from a normal physiological process to a medical procedure and a pathological event. This distortion may be seen as an overreaction to the dangers of some births, resulting in the application to all children and mothers of a biomedical model and technologies that may save some few endangered babies. The medicalization of childbirth and the application of emerging technologies to the detection and treatment of pathological conditions was in many ways a great advance. Even before the information about the dangers and counterproductivity of medicalized childbirth became available, some parents and some physicians were seeking alternatives to procedures they regarded as mechanical and alienating.
