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Coming Home: How Midwives Changed Birth

2020; Oxford University Press; Volume: 107; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jahist/jaaa234

1945-2314

Heather Munro Prescott,

Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes

In recent years, home birth has experienced a renaissance. A number of celebrities, including Demi Moore, Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, Cindy Crawford, and Brazilian supermodel Giselle Bundchen, have chosen to have their babies at home rather than in the hospital. The actress Ricki Lake's 2008 documentary, The Business of Being Born, contributed to the growing popularity of home birth in the twenty-first century. Wendy Kline's Coming Home puts this recent trend into a large historical context. Building on Judith Walzer Leavitt's classic Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750–1950 (1986), Kline shows how the growing popularity of home birth was a “quiet revolution” that emerged among diverse sectors of postwar American society. In the first two chapters, Kline demonstrates that the resurgence of home-birth practices originated not in the counterculture but among white, middle-class women in Chicago and suburban Washington, D.C. By starting the book with these case studies, Kline challenges the “oppositional model” of the relationship between midwifery and modern obstetrics presented in most other histories of midwifery, such as Deidre English and Barbara Ehrenreich's Witches, Midwives, and Nurses (1973). Instead, Kline shows how some doctors collaborated with lay midwives and birthing women to make home birth a viable alternative for women who wanted to avoid the medicalized hospital-birth experience. In chapters 3 and 4, Kline turns to the more familiar story of “hippie midwives” on the West Coast. Once again, she complicates the standard oppositional narrative, showing that while hippie midwives faced challenges from mainstream medicine, there were also instances of cooperation between midwives and physicians that advanced the cause of home-birth advocates.