Relocating childbirth: the politics of birth place and Aboriginal midwifery in Manitoba, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The place of birth for First Nations is a contested issue in Canada today. For the past 30 years, the practice of removing women from communities to birth in urban centre hospitals, called maternal evacuation, has been a part of the dialogue between First Nation organisations, the Canadian state, policy makers, and Academics. Concurrent to the practice of evacuation, there is a movement to repatriate birth to First Nations through Aboriginal midwifery. This multi-sited ethnography is based on 15 months of fieldwork in Manitoba, Canada and follows the practice of evacuation and the establishment of an Aboriginal midwifery practice in one northern First Nation community. The ethnography reveals that both evacuation and returning birth is a complex, multi-layered negotiation of risk between various actors. From women and their families, doctors and nurses, midwives and other health professionals: the management of risk is at the forefront of this discussion. This study takes into account how risk is imagined, created and targeted in the practice of maternity care for First Nations in Manitoba. The concept of risk and risk management takes on multiple forms as the practice of evacuation moves from the community to the urban centre, from federal land to provincial land, from the hospital to the board room. Through participation observation in the places of birth and interviews with the range of actors involved in maternity care for First Nations, this ethnography reveals the messiness of the concept of risk, and identifies where these actors collude and conflict on the topic of evacuation and repatriation. The study also traces how the state has co-opted the language of risk on all sides of this debate and how the bodies of the First Nations mother and midwife becomes sites in which these contestations over risk, responsibility, knowledge and safety occur.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.043 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".