Technology as a Last Resort in Home Birth: The Work of Lay Midwives

This paper considers an example of demedicalization in U.S. society by examining how 10 lay midwives described their work in attending home births. Committed to childbirth as a family event as opposed to a medical one, they tried to accomplish this by reallocating knowledge and responsibility among participants and by working to keep birth at home “natural,” relegating childbirth technology to a position of last resort before transporting women to the hospital. The midwives determined limits to their use of such technology according to their respective interpretations of collectively held norms. This work suggests that definitions of demedicalization rest upon two related bases: (1) participants abandoning their reliance upon the “technological fix;” and (2) experts becoming educators in a context of shared knowledge and responsibility.