Cultural anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd identifies three paradigms of health care that she considers to have strongly influenced contemporary childbirth in the West: the technocratic, humanistic, and holistic models of medicine. These cultural models of birth contrast and conflict in their fundamental conceptualisations of the body and its relationship to the mind.
This review broadly examines the both the holistic and humanist models of health care and explores how definitions of the body that move away from dominant mind-body dualism reshape the ways in which the body is treated within the context of childbirth. Revived interest in holistic or 'natural' birth began during the 1970s, with the introduction of new monitoring technologies and heightened medical control over birth, while the humanist approach to care in childbirth is a growing area in midwifery research in the UK and Scandinavian countries.
In reconnecting the mind with the body, the consciousness of a birthing women becomes fundamental to both the holistic and humanist models of birth. The review brings together alternative ways of thinking about the body in relation to the mind, including key works by phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, feminist political philosopher Iris Marion Young, the idea of intuition as authoritative knowledge in childbirth as articulated by sociologist Barbara Katz Rothman and Robbie Davis-Floyd.
As part of the review I briefly consider the meaning of the phrase 'normal' birth that is regularly used in contemporary literature around 'natural' birth or non-interventionist approaches to childbirth. As birth is not a uniform event (and a complex and subjective experience) the review explores the arguments around the word 'normal' in contemporary literature on natural birth.
The core of this review presents an overview of the history and philosophies of the natural childbirth movement including: the work of the late 18th Century Enlightenment philosophers Jean-Jaques Rousseau and Dennis Diderot in their nostalgic turn to nature; issues and agendas of race and class contained in the trope of the 'primitive' birth and the 'myth of painless childbirth' that began in the late 19th Century; the 'natural birth movement' in its first incarnation in Britain in the 1930's with its sinister associations with health reformers and reform eugenics; the advent of childbirth education in the theories and techniques of Grantly Dick-Read and Fernand Lamaze in the 1950s- key founders of the natural childbirth movement; and the 70s natural childbirth movement as part of a feminist movement, a counter-culture and an anti-consumerist movement that places an emphasis on the birthing woman's consciousness as central to the process of giving birth.
Lastly, this review provides an overview of the many and often competing interpretations of 'the natural' in context of birth. The review explores the arguments, tensions and contradictions that arise in framing birth as 'natural' in contemporary birth politics and considers ideas around both the 'fantasy of the natural' and the 'fetishisation of nature' in contemporary natural birth discourse.