Maternity care and infrastructures in Spain during Franco's regime

Abstract

ABSTRACT Over the last century, Western countries have undergone a process of medicalisation and hospitalisation of childbirth. This process led to the subordination of midwives to doctors’ authority and made the hospital the main focus of childbirth care, which entailed a break with the traditional formula. This article analyses the case of Spain, a country of special interest due to the convergence of three elements: a belated passage of public health insurance, a shortage of beds for maternity care and the context of a dictatorship where a woman’s role was almost exclusively that of wife and mother. Under these circumstances, home childbirth continued well into the 1970s, despite the interests of health policymakers who defended hospital childbirth although infrastructures were insufficient. Hence, when hospital delivery care finally became predominant in Spain, the debate about natural childbirth and a rejection of invasive techniques used in hospitals had already begun in other countries.