“I Wanted Empowerment, Healing, and Respect”: Homebirth as Challenge to Medical Hegemony

We utilize in-depth interviews with 30 homebirth mothers and 11 midwives in Oklahoma to understand their perspectives on power, ideology, and practices in society's hegemonic birth system. Employing Foucauldian, Foucauldian feminist, and social constructivist frameworks, we illuminate issues of reality construction, knowledge, and power related to the homebirth experience. Participants expressed distinctions between a biomedical and midwifery model. They described complex power / knowledge relations in the biomedical model whereby women's bodies are made docile through disciplinary technologies, including physician control of knowledge and panopticonic domination of time, space, and movements of the body. Homebirth mothers and midwives articulated narratives of empowerment, knowledge, and control in the philosophy and practice of the midwifery model and homebirth. In pursuing “empowerment, healing, and respect,” participants engaged in alternative practices and philosophies, garnered agency and empowerment, and challenged normative medical hegemony.