ese scientific discoveries, especially those related to the development of more effective treatments, lead to increased public acceptance of medicine (Borst, 1996).
According to Jacobson (2001), this increased emphasis on education and medicine lead to a concerted effort to eradicate the practice of midwifery. Jacobson states that arguments brought to bear against midwives were diverse and included the notions that the practice was unstandardized and lacked formal training in educational institutions, that birth outside of a hospital and a doctor's care was very risky. Indeed, one of the foremost authorities of this era, Dr. Joseph DeLee, declared that birth was a dangerous process from which few women would escape unscathed and most especially so without proper management which required several medical interventions. It was even argued that female midwives simply didn't have the intellectual capacity to do the job properly. However, Jacobson (2001) informs that the real motive behind the controversy over midwifery was that physicians wanted to monopolize the field of childbirth and to assure themselves of a prosperous financial future.
Nonetheless, in 1921, Legislators passed the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act of 1921 due to the perceived power of the woman's vote. This act provided funds for the training and regulation of midwives. The AMA, however, was vehemently opposed to state controlled medicine. Still, by 1929 the legislators were no longer intimidated by the woman's vote and the AMA's powerful lobby pushed to let the act expire (Brucker, 2001).
During the 1920s, Dr. DeLee's notion of birth as pathologic gained sway and his interventions such as sedating women during labor, allowing the cervix to dilate, delivering the baby with forceps, extracting the placenta, and so forth slowly became routine, and midwifery was actually made in illegal in several states (Marland & Rafferty, 1977). But proponen...