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I begin my historical analysis of the co-evolution of reproductive norms and desires, approaches to fertility control, and the meaning assigned to contraceptives with an examination of the Grafenberg Ring, the first modern IUD. The Grafenberg ring, developed in the late 1920s by a German doctor, Ernst Gräfenberg, was a small ring made of silkworm gut and coiled silver that can be compressed to be inserted into the uterus. The Grafenberg ring appeared at a time when changes in social attitude towards sexuality had formed a favorable climate for a new contraceptive method. The device was greeted with much interest from the European birth control movement, and Gräfenberg was invited to speak at the Third Congress of the World League for Sexual Reform held in London in 1929 and at the Seventh International Birth Control Conference in Zurich in 1930 (Davis, 1971).

The causal relationship between the size of welfare benefits and the birth decisions of women on welfare has been explored in a number of studies using a variety of analytical approaches applied to vital statistics data, data from the Current Population Survey, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, or similar survey data. These studies typically use non-experimental methods to relate differences in birth rates or birth decisions across states to differences in welfare benefits levels. Analyses of this type have been criticized on several grounds. Benefits across states may be correlated with unobserved interstate differences that may also be related to birth decisions. Very often, these studies measure the key independent variable, welfare benefits level, as the cash benefit guarantee under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program for a household of fixed size, varying this amount by state of residence. Actual benefits paid will vary with household size, number of AFDC-eligible household members, other sources of income, and other factors.

Language is a fundamental and yet extraordinarily powerful medium. Language is more than the primary feature distinguishing humans from other species. As our principle means of communication, language links us to culture, and in so doing, shapes our perceptions and determines the way in which we think (Clark, Eschholz & Rosa, 1981; Thorne, Kramarae & Henley, 1983). Language is inseparable from social life. Through language, individuals learn cultural patterns and political and social values (Mueller, 1973). Language also reflects the prejudices of society, with assumptions about relative status, power or appropriate behavior often built into the words we use to talk about different groups of people. As Frank and Anshen (1983) note, ageism, racism, and most importantly for this discussion, sexism, are all perpetuated by our language, even among those who consciously reject those prejudices.

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.

We estimate the parental investment response to the child endowment at birth, by analysing the effect of child birth weight on the hours worked by the mother two years after birth. Mother’s working hours soon after child birth are a measure of investments in their children as a decrease (increase) in hours raises (lowers) her time investment in the child. The child birth endowment is endogenously determined in part by unobserved traits of parents, such as investments during pregnancy. We adopt an instrumental variables estimation. Our instrumental variables are measures of the father’s health endowment at birth, which drive child birth weight through genetic transmission but does not affect directly the mother’s postnatal investments, conditional on maternal and paternal human capital and prenatal investments. We find an inverted U-shape relationship between mothers worked hours and birth weight, suggesting that both low and extremely high child birth weight are associated with child health issues for which mothers compensate by reducing their labour supply. The mother’s compensating response to child birth weight seems slightly attenuated for second and later born children. Our study contributes to the literature on the response of parental investments to child’s health at birth by proposing new and more credible instrumental variables for the child health endowment at birth and allowing for a heterogeneous response of the mother’s investment for first born and later born children.

Frequently women are attended by someone other than their chosen doctor during labor and delivery, that is, an “on-call” doctor. This chapter draws from interviews with 19 women who gave birth in a Mid-Atlantic state during late 1995 and early 1996. Of these women, 13 received care from an on-call doctor. Using existing social–psychological perspectives, the authors analyze situations in which an on-call doctor was present, and how this provider influenced women's birth experiences as well as satisfaction with those experiences. In general, women do not expect or desire on-call doctors’ presence. As a result, they may rely on obstetric nurses, rather than these unfamiliar doctors, when they need information or support.

We discuss adoption as a diverse family structure in America. Adoption has existed in some form throughout the history with the portrayal varying by historical epoch. Adoption has been both disparaged and idealized to perpetuate the interest of elite players. This chapter discusses adoption in terms of the changing demographic which 21st century families face. In this manuscript, we first discuss the history of adoption in the United States including its impact as social control of premarital sex. Then the three players in the adoption triad are discussed and analyzed. Finally, we highlight how demographics of race, class, gender, and sexuality impact the adoption experience by 21st century families. Specifically, we explore the recent National Survey of Adoptive Parents from the United States Center for Disease Control and look at the modern adoption experience

Purpose – This chapter briefly outlines the history of childbirth in the United States and describes the influence of the natural birth movement and consumer demand in shaping the contemporary advertising of mainstream maternity services.

Design/methodology/approach – Qualitative content analysis of 59 hospital websites was undertaken in order to understand how hospitals depict childbirth in their online advertising.

Findings – Our findings illustrate how contemporary medical institutions idealize childbirth through their depictions of its physical and social dimensions. Although hospital advertising has adopted some of the rhetoric of the natural birth movement in describing the social and symbolic dimensions of the childbirth experience, this rhetoric is shown to stand in tension to the highly rationalized and bureaucratic institutional nature of hospitals. These tensions are most apparent in advertised descriptions of the physical environment of maternity centers and in the attempt to depict hospitalized birth as an opportunity for the individual empowerment of women.

Research limitations/implications – This research is limited to an analysis of how providers advertise their services and does not provide data on whether practices actually reflect the rhetoric of the ideal birth. Future research should consider the fit between rhetoric and reality in hospital maternity practices in order to better understand the social structural constraints of delivering these services in a hospital maternity center.

Originality/value – This chapter highlights the importance of consumer demand for how maternity services are portrayed and identifies key tensions between an idealized image of birth and the rational, bureaucratic demands of modern medical institutions.

This chapter is concerned with the varied legitimizing discourses used by midwives to frame their identities in relation to their work. This sociological issue is particularly important in the context of an occupation, such as this one, that exists at the border of competing service claims. Drawing on 26 in-depth interviews, I use narrative analysis to examine the stories that midwives tell about their work. Through these women’s work narratives, I show the complex intersection of narrative, culture, institution, and biography (Chase, 1995, 2001; DeVault, 1999).

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.