ABSTRACT
The chapter aims to tease out the experiences of women's maternity services in order to consider the complexity of their responses. Its findings are based on seventy oral history interviews with women from Berkshire and Oxfordshire. After 1970, women principally attended either midwife-led units in maternity hospitals or small local hospitals, or consultant-led units in larger general hospitals. The chapter is divided into two main parts. The first part considers the interviewees' experiences and attitudes towards five practices that were common during the period: ultrasound scans, episiotomy, induction, epidural anaesthesia and caesarean section. The second part examines women's accounts of their relationships with the hospital staff who attended them. Contemporary studies revealed that the increasing technologization of pregnancy was magnified when it came to childbirth itself. The chapter concludes that it was not simply technical advances women reacted against, but the way in which they were employed.
