The Legacy of Midwifery and the Women’s Health Movement in Contemporary Discourses of Patient Choice and Empowerment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This commentary traces the roots of the notion of patient empowerment and patient-centred care to the radical beginnings of the women’s health movement and the feminist critiques of medicalized childbirth. I pay particular attention to the emergence of the concept of informed choice in community midwifery as one of the women’s health movement’s key strategies to combine medical science with women’s own experience to effect the empowerment of women in health care. I also reflect on the limitations of the notions of empowerment and choice as they have been taken up by mainstream health institutions and the health care marketplace-often without acknowledging the contributions of midwifery and the women’s health movement-noting the diminished promise and potentially problematic effects of taking these notions out of their political contexts. This article has been peer reviewed.
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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 | 0.031 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.128 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".