“A midwife at every confinement”: Midwifery and Medicalized Childbirth in Ontario and Britain, 1920–1950
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper compares midwifery in Ontario and Britain in the first half of the 20th century. British midwives improved maternal and infant health and welfare by making childbirth a cooperative, medically managed event in conjunction with physicians. British midwives thus participated in, and contributed to, developments in obstetrics. In contrast, Ontario physicians worked to exclude midwives from participation in the modernization of birth management, relying on a narrower concept of "medicalization" defined as physician dominance. This study challenges the medical profession's assumptions that the exclusion of midwifery in Ontario was necessary to the medicalization of childbirth. The British alternative, where midwives were seen as partners rather than obstacles, illustrates that medicalization in the interest of infant and maternal safety could be integrated with the work of midwives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".