For this discussion question, please consider the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth in our culture. Reviewing your textbooks section on direct-entry midwives might be useful. One scholar explains that medicalized pregnancy involves interpreting pregnancy itself as a disruption to health that necessarily requires expert medical intervention and thinking of pregnancy as primarily about health and illness (Mullin 2005, 54)*. Similarly, childbirth has been increasingly medicalized in the developed world a process that results in some indisputable benefits (for example, prevention of placenta previa, ectopic pregnancy and a myriad of childbirth complication) as well as routinization of medical practices that dont necessarily benefit the mother or child (fetal monitoring, labor-inducing drugs, epidurals, episiotomies, caesarian sections, etc.). For this post, please select and discuss one positive and one negative aspect of medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth how can it benefit or negatively affect us, as consumers of health care, as medical professionals, as parents, as children, as a culture at large?
*Mullin, Amy, 2005, Reconceiving Pregnancy and Childcare: Ethics, Experience, and Reproductive Labor.
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