Epiduralized Birth and Nurse-Midwifery: Childbirth in the United States. A Medical Ethnography

There exists an abundance of books about childbirth. What has been missing is a work that describes American childbirth from an ethnographic standpoint, utilizing the rich, insightful data that can only be derived from real-life observations of childbirth. This new ethnography, Epiduralized Birth and Nurse-Midwifery: Childbirth in the United States, helps to meet that need. It examines the state of maternity care in the United States through the lens of one midwifery service at a community hospital. The author has based the ethnography on her 2014 dissertation. (Research included a year of on-site observation and interviews.) It is a significant addition to the study of American childbirth and nurse-midwifery.

The book describes recent developments in maternity care, what the author refers to as epiduralized birth: a way of birth that is antithetical to ecological birth. The book also describes care provided by a nurse-midwifery service, care that involves a "normality paradox" among midwives who must negotiate highly technicalized care that often runs contrary to their professional and personal values.

Epiduralized birth is an assembly-line process where all interventions are integrated, inseparable, and interdependent elements of a single process - a process that has the epidural at its core. Birth has moved beyond the cascade of interventions. The cascade of interventions has been standardized to make up a systematic, interdependent group of elements that make up a highly technical process: a process that includes all interventions as an entirety, as in a well-oiled machine. Industrialized birth is discussed with rich, detailed ethnographic data.

This medical ethnography is interdisciplinary. As such, it has much to offer a variety of disciplines including but not limited to the study of childbirth, women's health, anthropology, sociology, health care sciences, public policy, and women's studies.