For thousands of years, the midwife was the principal agent of childbirth external to the family. Medicalization of childbirth, which positioned physicians in the place of midwives, is a relatively recent innovation in human experience, having emerged more or less along with the Industrial Revolution. At a time when, in the industrialized countries, state-of-the-art technology dominates medical care, the far less technology-driven practice of midwifery has reemerged as a viable alternative to hospital childbirth. It has also become a source of controversy. Yet there is compelling evidence that midwives are safer than doctors in childbirth and that the advantages of midwifery are greater than those of technology-driven obstetrics practice.
Pregnancy and childbirth are unique to the medical environment in that they are conditions that have for more than 100 years been treated as something they are not: illnesses. In the US, the obstetrics medical specialty controlled childbirth practices, and the impulse to "cure" fostered a whole range of interventions, from medical instruments to feet in the stirrups, in what is usually a normal, healthy event. Midwifery does not refer to a heroic curative medical intervention but instead simply to the act or of assisting at childbirth.
The long tradition of "granny midwives," i.e., older women past childbearing age who informally assisted at childbirths, fell into disuse, except in rural and impoverished black communities, with the rise of the obstetrics specialty over the course of the 20th century (Stewart, 1998e). As recently as the 1980s, the medical establishment resisted the reappearance and licensing of midwives as a natural adjunct to natural childbirth (Brook, 1976). But the weight of evidence is in favor of the midwifery rather than "doctoring" approach to childbirth because of the greater likelihood that a midwife will "attend[] births with an attitude of respect for individuality, su...