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There is extensive research documenting the physical outcomes of childbirth, but significantly less on socio-psychological outcomes. Investigating women’s perception of dignified treatment during birth contributes to a salient, under-examined aspect of women’s childbirth experiences.

We use a two-part conceptualization of dignity, respect and autonomy, to understand how birth experiences and interactions either facilitate or undermine women’s perceived dignity. Data came from the Listening-to-Mothers I survey, the first nationally representative study of postpartum women in the United States (n = 1,406). Through linear regression analysis, we separately modeled women’s perception of respectful treatment and women’s perception of medical autonomy during birth.

Overall women reported high scores for both autonomy and respect. Differences between the models emerged related primarily to the role of interventions and provider support. While women’s perceived dignity is related to elements that she brings in to the delivery room (e.g., birth knowledge, health status), much variation was explained by the medical encounter itself (e.g., type of medical interventions, pain management, nurse support, and number of staff present).

This study is cross-sectional, and required either a telephone or internet access, thus limiting the full generalizability of findings. Two findings have direct practical relevance for promoting women’s dignity in childbirth. First, the number of staff persons present during labor and birth was negatively associated with both respect and autonomy. Second, that women with high levels of knowledge about their legal rights during childbirth were more likely to report high scores on the dignity scale. Limiting staff in the delivery room and including knowledge of legal rights in childbirth education or during prenatal visits may be two mechanisms to promote dignity in birth.

These findings address an important, under-examined aspect of women’s childbirth experiences. This study investigates how different birth experiences and interactions either promote or violate childbearing women’s perception of dignity, and has significant implications for the provision of maternal healthcare. The results reinforce the importance of focusing on the socio-psychological dimensions of childbirth.

There has been substantial interest in US cesarean rates, which increased from 5% of deliveries in the 1970s to nearly one-third of births by the mid-2000s. Explanations typically emphasize individual risk factors (e.g., advanced maternal age, increased BMI, and greater desire for control over delivery) of women giving birth, or address institutional factors, such as the medicalization of childbirth and the culture of liability leading physicians to practice defensive medicine. We focus here on another non-medical explanation – childbirth education (CBE). CBE is an important, underexplored mechanism that can shape women’s expectations about labor and birth and potentially lead them to expect, or desire, a cesarean delivery as a normalized outcome. We analyze data from three waves (2002, 2006, 2013) of the Listening to Mothers national survey on US women’s childbearing experiences (n = 3,985). Using logistic regression analysis, we examined both mode of delivery (vaginal versus cesarean), and attitudes about future request for elective cesarean among both primiparous and multiparous women. Despite previous research suggesting that CBE increased the likelihood of vaginal delivery, we find that CBE attendance was not associated with likelihood of vaginal delivery among either primiparous or multiparous women. However, both primiparous and multiparous women who attended CBE classes were significantly more likely to say they would request a future, elective cesarean. Furthermore, these effects were in the opposite direction of effects for natural birth attitudes. Our findings suggest that contemporary CBE classes may be a form of “anticipatory socialization”, potentially priming women’s acceptance of medicalized childbirth.

This article examines the dialectics of wrongful life and wrongful birth claims in Israel from 1986 until 2012. In May 2012 Israeli Supreme Court declared that while wrongful birth claims were still permitted, wrongful life claims were no longer accepted in a court of law. The article examines the conditions that allowed for and supported the expansion of wrongful life/birth claims until 2012. The article identifies two parallel dynamics of expansion: a broadening of the scope of negligent conduct and a view of milder forms of disabilities as damage that merits compensation. The article further suggests four explanations for such doctrinal evolution, two of which emanate from doctrinal ambiguities and the other two are rooted in social factors that have shaped the meaning of disability as a tragedy and state of inferiority. While recent developments seem promising, the article concludes with a word of caution. Such changes may reproduce past injustices mainly because the compensation mechanism has remained an individual-torts based one, which may run counter to the broader struggle for social change for disabled people.

Despite all recent changes in families, and maybe because of them, the birth of a child remains an event of intense expectation, investment, and symbolic meaning. In this chapter, we offer a simultaneously new, innovative, and contemporary perspective on the social construction of the family through the lens of family rituals, specifically directed to the postnatal hospital visit following the birth of a child. The raw data were collected through episodic interviews carried out to Portuguese middle-class men and women. A qualitative content analysis of their detailed descriptions was then conducted making use of software NVivo (©QSR International). The sociological perspective we used allows us to conclude that the moment of the birth of a child is a quintessential time–space for the social construction of the family. Around the baby, for the task of rocking the cradle, men and women join and take on their old and new roles. While the postnatal hospital visit allows the presentation of the newborn family member for the extended family and friends, it strongly underlies the strategies and senses of belonging to one particular family, thereby serving the purpose of its social construction.

This chapter at hand applies and extends Friedland and Alford's model of institutional logics to the case of birth practises focusing on a number of interrelated topics, namely, identity, trust, and ideology. It draws on Giddens's theory of modernity to “bring society back in,” as Friedland and Alford have formulated one major point of critique against existing institutional approaches. In its theoretical discussion, the chapter will focus on two issues: first, the treatment of conflict as a motor of institutional dynamics, and second, the relation between institutions and agency. The empirical data is based on participant observation, qualitative interviews with midwives and obstetricians, and a review of magazines and television material concerning birth and parenting.

This contribution critiques U.S. practices respecting birth citizenship. It first describes the logic of territorial birthright citizenship. The practice makes sense only insofar as place of birth has supplied a proxy for community membership. But many who are born in the United States leave permanently at an early age. It is not clear why they should be able to take their citizenship with them. The paper also critiques the liberalized basis for acquiring citizenship on the basis of parentage. In both cases, birth citizenship creates an increasing disconnect between the formal and organic boundaries of community. This disconnect could be addressed by the adoption of presence requirements beyond birth. Presence requirements would be consistent with liberal values to the extent they would strengthen the solidarities of the liberal state. However, it is unclear that presence gives rise to such solidarities. It is also improbable that presence requirements will be adopted. This both evidences and reinforces the declining salience of citizenship.

After their long deconstruction of the notion of culture, social sciences have set about deconstructing the idea of nature, considering it as a social representation with variations in time and in space. From this point of view, human reproduction is a particularly appropriate field of observation. Above and beyond the shared imaginary, in fact, nature does not (only) corresponds, at the empirical level, to biological data in human reproduction. As will we see in this chapter, what is thought to correspond to nature in relation to childbearing experience turns out to be something extremely sophisticated, with characteristics not unlike those of a cultural product. Based on the ethnographic research I carried out in one of the first maternity hospital in Italy to introduce natural childbirth, the chapter aims to add to the study of how nature is referred to in this model of birth, why is this category invoked and the extent to which its functions and contents have changed over time.

Historically, a major focus of women's health research has been on the increasing medicalization of “natural” reproductive processes, with early feminist scholarship in this area largely critical of this trend. Recently, feminist scholars have begun to explore the various ways that women actually experience medicalization. We suggest that current feminist scholarship on medicalization and childbirth remains limited in two ways: (1) much of this research still focuses on privileged women and neglects the experiences of women at various social locations, as well as how oppression and privilege shape those experiences and (2) existing literature does not operationalize what medicalization or “natural” reproductive processes mean for individual women. More specifically, feminist scholars have not investigated systematically how diverse women define and experience their births within the context of a taken-for-granted definitional dichotomy of “natural” versus “medical” birth that characterizes much of the classic and contemporary feminist literature. In this chapter, we explore women's different discussions of “natural” birth and, by default, learn about their definitions of medicalization as well. Drawing from a critical, comparative analysis of qualitative, empirical data gathered from three different groups of childbearing women in two studies – that is, middle-class Caucasian adult women birthing in a hospital setting, middle-class Caucasian adult women birthing in a birthing center setting, and poor African American teen mothers birthing in a hospital setting – we propose a new methodological and conceptual framework for re-examining the meanings of “natural” versus “medical” birth experiences and pushing beyond a strictly gender-based analysis.

Although birth-preparation classes are the most important institution for parents-to-be, they have largely been disregarded in sociological research. This empirical study aims to examine the role birth-preparation classes in Germany play in the extensive gendering during the transition to parenthood. We combine ethnography of birth-preparation classes with a content analysis of text material offered by professional associations of midwives. This empirical investigation aims to show that today’s birth-preparation classes highlight differences between men and women as well as between women without children and mothers, interconnect them with gendered attributions of child care and labor and legitimize these differences through naturalization. Thus, birth-preparation classes introduce a gendered distribution of labor as early as the antenatal phase and thereby function as institutions promoting a process of regendering and retraditionalization.