ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on legal issues and women’s options for childbirth globally as well as the implications for midwives irrespective of the midwifery model of care. It also focuses on the midwife’s legal implications of meeting a woman’s wishes and the midwife’s legal duty of care and accountability. The chapter provides meeting a woman’s expectations in a legal context and also focuses on the concept of vicarious liability and clinical negligence. The general standard of care expected by the reasonable man is an objective one. Experts and professionals such as midwives with particular skills are judged by the standards of the ‘reasonable man’ with those specialist skills. In Nettleship v Weston, the court found that inexperience was not a defence as a practitioner is expected to be competent at the point of registration. Midwives wherever an emergency may arise must offer anyone at risk the assistance they could reasonably be expected to provide.
