BIRTHING AUTONOMY Women’s Experiences Of Planning Home Births by NADINE EDWARDS
BIRTHING AUTONOMY: Women’s Experiences Of Planning Home Births by NADINE EDWARDS
IN HER BOOK, Birthing Autonomy: Women’s Experiences of Planning Home Births, Nadine Edwards brings some balance to the difficult arguments that arise from debates about home births, and focuses on women’s views and their experiences of planning home births. It provides an in-depth exploration of how women make decisions about home births and what aspects matter most to them. Comparing how differently the pros and cons of home births are constructed and contemplated by mothers and by the medical profession, the book looks at how current obstetric thinking and practices can disempower and harm women emotionally and spiritually as well as physically.
Written in an accessible style, this book is enlightening for student and practicing midwives and obstetricians, as well as researchers and students of nursing, medical sociology, health studies, gender studies, feminist practitioners and theorists. It will also be invaluable to expectant mothers who want to be more informed about the choices they are facing and the wider context within which their birth options are considered.
Buy Online
Birthing Autonomy Women’s Experiences of Planning Home Births is avaliable to purchase online from the publisher’s website here: https://www.routledge.com/Birthing-Autonomy-Womens-Experiences-of-Planning-Home-Births/Edwards/p/book/9780415354097
Reviews
“It has taken me a long time to get round to reading this book and in the intervening time, the points that the author makes have become even more salient and the situation for birthing women even less rosy.
“This may look like a niche book. It isn’t. This is absolutely fundamental stuff. Edwards’ PhD study interviewed, in a very intelligent way, women planning, and having, or not having, babies born at home. And boy did she get some very intelligent, far from uniform, responses. The way she has written the book allows us to hear the women’s voices loud and clear, and then she has done the work to draw out the themes. Which may be surprising… Spoiler Alert: It’s not about geography. Her findings present both a challenge and an opportunity. One which midwifery is failing, big time currently (I say midwifery not ‘midwives’ for reasons that are made clear in the book and in other powerful works) Her work shows the impact not just in a narrow clinical sense, nor even just on parenting, but on women (and their partners) in much bigger ways. Get birth ‘right’ (by which I don’t mean ‘lucky’) and you might change the world. (She doesn’t quite say this but I do wonder if one of the forces in opposite isn’t an unconscious fear of the power of the empowered vs the (sadly usual) disempowerment)” – from: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2048954.Birthing_Autonomy?from_search=true
‘If you’ve felt disempowered by the birthing profession in your choice to home birth, you’ll no doubt find a great ally in this book’ – The Mother
PhD Thesis
Nadine’s book is based on her PhD thesis, Women’s experiences of planning home births in Scotland: birthing autonomy, University of Sheffield, which is available, in full, for free download here: http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/12829/
Abstract
The general aim of this study was to provide an in-depth exploration of the experiences of a group of 30 women who planned home births. This was to expand on the small amount of qualitative research in the field and suggest avenues for further research. With this general aim, I analysed the women’s experiences in relation to the contexts in which they planned home births in order to provide a useful account for the women in the study, those who may plan home births in the future, as well as clinicians, managers and policy-makers involved in maternity services. I considered some of the wider political, social and historical discourses, which underpin the present situation in Scotland regarding home births. While I acknowledged that these are unstable reference points, they were useful in gaining insights into the current situation. This was particularly the case when looking at home birth as part of a complex interplay between dominant and subordinate ideologies, which were partially played out through gender relations symbolised by the male doctor and the female midwife. A postmodern reading of feminisms provided the conceptual tools to examine diverse belief systems around birth in relation to women’s narratives. Suspending “truth” enabled diverse knowledges to become more visible. This validated women’s experiential knowledge which could then be placed alongside other knowledge systems, and examined in terms of dominant and marginalised ideologies. The project became one of conflicts and silences, searching out and listening to, and making visible “other” voices. This raised issues of power, control, autonomy and resistance. In most cases I interviewed each woman twice before her baby’s birth and twice following the birth. Interviews were usually 1 Y2 to 2 hours in length, taped and transcribed. A qualitative software program, NUD*IST was used to assist with analysis, but the conceptual framework for the analysis remained rooted in a postmodern feminist approach using a relational voice methodology. The main findings were that National Health Service (NHS) community midwifery services were based on an attenuated technocratic model of birth. This imposed a philosophy and structure of care that prevented women and midwives from developing alternative ideologies based on their own knowledges. It prevented women and midwives from forming trusting, supportive relationships, which stand at the core of holistic philosophies of birth. Women and midwives were often obliged to draw on subversive techniques to use their knowledge and skills in order to make the best of a system which by definition could not be woman-centred or holistic. The main conclusion was that birth requires to be socialised rather than medicalised, so that technology and medical practices can be developed and used to support women and babies, and midwifery practices when necessary, rather than birth being technocratised and social practices used to humanise an essentially inhumane system of care.
Contact
Please contact Nadine Edwards by email at: nadine [at] edwards.scot