Hospitals have adopted a rhetoric of family-centered maternity care, and one of the ways in which they show their commitment to it is through the integration of the husband-as-coach model of childbirth (the Bradley method) into delivery practices. I argue that this model's widespread popularity testifies less to the culture's endorsement of a woman-centered approach than to healthcare's appropriation of “natural” childbirth as a site for the production and reproduction of patriarchal and capitalist power.
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Carine M. Mardorossian (2003) studied this question.
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