They Inadvertently Forgot the Midwives: Autoethnography of a Midwife in the Early 21st Century

Abstract

The anthropological research on midwifery is extensive. It often, though, presents a view of the midwife struggling to maintain her commitment to childbirth without routine medical intervention in the face of a persistent encroachment of biomedicine over maternity care. Midwives and obstetricians are conceptualized as opposing figures, the midwife based in nature and the obstetrician based in technology. But, as postmodernism in anthropology has introduced a more nuanced and relativistic view of culture and society, and of truth, the praxis of midwifery itself has evolved in similar ways. The medical anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd and the midwife Elizabeth Davis (1997) introduced the moniker of the “postmodern midwife” to describe this new actor. The “postmodern midwife” is seen as less dogmatic about her profession and more able to alter her practice to accommodate the needs of biomedicine while still maintaining her humanistic training. This new midwife seems poised then to flourish in settings based on collaborative care, where the storied dichotomy between midwives and obstetricians is blurred and instead the two work together to care for maternity patients in a collegial environment. In this work, I take an autoethnographic view as a midwife in such a collaborative obstetric setting and while examining issues of professional integrity and satisfaction, of professional competition versus cooperation, and of institutional and organizational biases from the perspective of one midwife, I explore the midwife’s role in this setting. With grounded theory, critical medical anthropology, and feminist theory as theoretical framework, I find that rather than expand the potential role of the midwife, the collaborative model can instead diminish the role of midwife and reinforce the medical hierarchy between the two professions.