Since the dawn of human kind, women have been giving birth. For centuries, even millennia afterward, women continued to give birth and aid other women through their deliveries. Yet somehow, in the relatively recent past, the 'business' of childbirth, labour and pregnancy was taken from the hands of the women, and placed in the gloved hands of the medical establishment. If you look through the history of birthing procedures, you will see the loss of women's control, which seemed to have occurred relatively abruptly. Doctors replaced midwives and labouring women went from being active decision makers in the birthing process to passive recipients of care. Care which was determined by experts in a technologically sophisticated profit-making setting (Strother-Ratcliff, 2002). Over the past fifty or so years, childbirth and pregnancy has undergone the process of medicalization, that is the expansion of medical jurisdiction into the realms of the other previously non-medically defined problems, a process which dearly serves the interests of medicine with its increasing focus on the indictors of disease rather than individuals' experience of health and illness (Cahill, 2001:338-339). .
This area of women's health has been medicalized to the point that it is now viewed as a pathological event that needs to be carefully managed, not a natural process, and that the hospital is the best and safest place to give birth. But the questions this medicalization raises are plentiful. Are the interventions one is likely to experience in the hospital necessary, or even safe? What is the alternative for those who want to have a more 'natural' birth? Who can elect to have a natural birth? What are the implications for promoting home/midwife assisted births? What else can be done to take the control over childbirth back for the women who are giving birth? These questions, among others will be the focus of discussion surrounding the medicalization of childbirth and the midwifery alternative.