ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the roots of the medicalisation of childbearing and how medicalisation is manifested and perpetuated in the current context of maternity care, with specific reference to dominant medical discourses of risk and risk management. It critically explores the myth of informed choice and the emergence of discourses and activisms which resist the medical control of childbearing. The chapter aims to deconstruct and make explicit the ways in which medicalisation continues to define and limit the scope of maternity care and how its discourses continue to affect childbearing women. An ideological position of feminist midwifery is used to explore these issues by reviewing the history, construction and perpetuation of medicalisation in childbearing, proposing an alternative, social model of birth. The chapter addresses the evolution of childbearing within the context of the science, technology and scientific/political rhetoric that now restricts women's liberties even further as they make the transition into motherhood.
