Journal
CULTURE MEDICINE AND PSYCHIATRY
Volume 42, Issue 2, Pages 278-294Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s11013-017-9560-9
Keywords
Informed choice; Midwifery; Midwifery in Canada; Anthropology of reproduction
Categories
Funding
- York University Research Release Award
Ask authors/readers for more resources
This paper is about the clinical principle of informed choice-the hallmark feature of the midwifery model of care in Ontario, Canada. Drawing on ethnographic history interviews with midwives, I trace the origins of the idea of informed choice to its roots in the social movement of midwifery in North America in the late 1960s and 1970s. At that time informed choice was not the distinctive feature of midwifery but was deeply embedded what I call midwifery's feminist experiment in care. But as midwifery in Ontario transitioned from a social movement to a full profession within the formal health care system, informed choice was strategically foregrounded in order to make the midwifery model of care legible and acceptable to a skeptical medical profession, conservative law makers, and a mainstream clientele. As mainstream biomedicine now takes up the rhetoric of patient empowerment and informed choice, this paper is at once a nuanced history of the making of the concept and also a critique of the ascendant 'regime of choice' in contemporary health care, inspired by the reflections of the midwives in my study for whom choice is impossible without care.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available