Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper covers various aspects of the contemporary issues faced by the midwifery profession in America with a focus on gendered issues of midwives and their clients. My analysis begins by considering the historically embedded practice of North American midwifery. The shift from birthing and maternity as a women’s domain to the territory of the newly trained male medical practitioner is outlined. I then undertake an examination of how midwifery is perceived today, including what footing it has gained and lost since the nineteenth century, and how the proliferation of consumerism has impacted midwifery practice. The overarching theme of the piece is to demonstrate how midwifery has functioned historically and in the present as a means of empowering women and allowing them to retain control over their bodies through pregnancy and the birthing process. This approach is in competition with the dominant biomedical model, which portrays the (male) medical practitioner as an all-knowing presence and the woman as a machine to be handled. The core question considered is how North American midwifery has changed over time and how issues of gendered work and patriarchal domination in medicine have influenced these changes. Methodologically, this paper considers how various scholars conceptualized midwifery and the issue of the medicalization of women’s bodies present within the dominant biomedical model. The desire for control, which is experienced by many women, is conceptualized as partially stemming from the negative experiences some women have encountered within obstetrics, and with male medical professionals specifically. I conclude with a discussion of how due to various factors, such as consumerism and neoliberal ideologies, midwifery is located within discourses regarding choice and women’s reclamation of control over their bodies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".