ABSTRACT
The first in a group of readings on infancy and childhood, this selection considers the process of medicalization discussed in previous selections as it has affected the relationship between mothers and infants. The hospitalization of childbirth, guided by mechanical understandings and instrumental approaches, provides a clear example of the medicalization of a process that previously had been managed by relatives or traditional birth assistants (see Davis-Floyd and Sargent 1997). Although the role of the modern physician may seem paramount in medicalized childbirth, the presence of birth assistants is not new but has been a fact of human existence ever since the evolutionary step toward bipedalism. This step produced skeletal constraints that require the fetus to change direction during childbirth and emerge face downward, making it very difficult for women to give birth alone (Trevathan and Rosenberg 2000). Our biology is evidence of the social nature of human existence.
