Abstract
SummaryAmid wider efforts to improve maternal and infant health in Britain around the First World War, public health officials debated making pregnancy a notifiable condition. Although the policy never entered national legislation, a number of local authorities introduced ‘notification of pregnancy’ schemes in various guises, with at least one surviving until the 1950s. Resistance from private practitioners to infectious diseases notification in the later nineteenth century has been well documented. We know less about opposition to the extension of this measure to maternal and infant welfare, especially from newly professionalising female health occupations. Conflict over notification of pregnancy drew midwives, in particular, into longstanding arguments over the powers of municipal authorities, family privacy and professional ethics. The controversy was the key battleground in negotiations over the organisation of ‘antenatal care’ as occupational groups of varying degrees of authority sought to define their roles and responsibilities within the emerging health services.
Highlights
By around 1900, obstetric specialists in various countries were contending that women and their unborn infants could be safeguarded from the risks of childbearing through medical supervision and good hygiene during pregnancy
In a highly critical commentary on maternity and infant welfare, the British Medical Journal singled out the prospect of notification of pregnancy as dangerous for the private practitioner
The leadership of the Institute lobbied against notification, both in principle and in practice, including by reporting on the actions of local authorities in nursing and midwifery journals and pro-suffrage periodicals, advising regional midwives associations, and by formally petitioning the Local Government Board (LGB) on their behalf
Summary
By around 1900, obstetric specialists in various countries were contending that women and their unborn infants could be safeguarded from the risks of childbearing through medical supervision and good hygiene during pregnancy These arguments fed into a transnational debate about the necessity of public assistance and protection for mothers, including maternity benefits and other ‘family’ welfare reforms. Official reports and memoranda outlining how local authorities might use government grants to develop unified maternity and child welfare schemes enshrined the core principle of statutory antenatal supervision: that ‘medical advice and, where necessary, treatment should be continuously and systematically available for expectant mothers’.24. As would be repeatedly stressed, the success of these services relied on a high degree of cooperation between local health authorities, voluntary associations, midwives, GPs and hospitals It required occupational groups with distinct interests to recognise the supervision of expectant mothers as a collective endeavour.. Proponents of antenatal care accepted that inadequate attention to the hygiene of pregnancy was an issue at all levels of society, working-class mothers were the primary targets of such criticisms. poor attendance was explained, those promoting and administering antenatal services recognised the need for a coordinated strategy for getting in contact with mothers
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