Place For Birth Research Articles

A Place for Birth: Storytelling in Interdisciplinary Education

This micronarrative describes a participatory teaching event involving students of midwifery and design. Using generative design methodologies and adopting storytelling as a common ground, the design workshop sought to raise awareness of the spatial impact of the birth environment on all those who pass through it. This narrative demonstrates the value of stories in an interdisciplinary context and reveals how stories can be a vehicle to explore and provide for difference, something to which contemporary midwifery is committed. The paper aims to illustrate how thinking spatially can reveal perceptions of care and bring women’s voices to the foreground.

The birthing house as a place for birth: contextualizing the Rio de Janeiro birthing house.

Within the context of the creation of birthing houses around the world and different models of care for childbirth, the author proposes an analysis that contributes to the discussion about the place for birth, especially in urban Brazil.

Võromaa suitsusaunakombestik kanti UNESCO vaimse pärandi esindusnimekirja / The Võro smoke sauna tradition has been added to the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity

The Old-Võro smoke sauna tradition was added to the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2014. The idea began with an e-mail in 2008 and, thanks to active citizens, it became worldrenowned six years later.
 For our ancestors, the smoke sauna was much more than just a space to wash themselves: it has been the place for birth and death, a place for preventing illnesses and for curing them. Even though many of the fast-paced city dwellers have changed their habits, there are a lot of families that value the continuance of old customs and tradition. Meat smoked in a smoke sauna, Saturday evenings with the family and the celebration of events in the Estonian Folk Calendar are just a few examples of the rich Estonian traditions.
 Keywords: UNESCO, intangible cultural heritage, smoke sauna

‘Unfinished business’? Reflections on Changing Childbirth 20 years on

On 17 October 2013 a ‘witness’ seminar was held in London, UK, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the publication of the English report Changing Childbirth Department of Health (1993). Most official reports have their day in the sun and then sink, superseded by the next initiative. Changing Childbirth was always a report with a difference however. Midwives who were in practice when it was originally produced still remember it; student midwives still debate its meaning and impact. Twenty years on the language developed by the authors of the report, which talked about choice, control and continuity of care for women, still resonates powerfully within the United Kingdom (UK) maternity services. The Changing Childbirth report was produced in 1993 by the Expert Maternity Group, convened by the Conservative Government and chaired by Baroness Cumberlege. It followed the publication in 1992 of the Winterton Report (DOH, 1992) and built on its recommendations. Changing Childbirth and the Winterton Report were widely heralded for enshrining the concept of woman-centred care and they led to the creation of many practice initiatives designed to support their core recommendations. They reversed official policy that hospital was always the safest place for birth, and highlighted the psychological as well as the physical impact of childbearing on women. The continued power of the report was demonstrated by the willingness of key players to attend the seminar and to discuss its development and legacy. The panel of discussants included Sir Nicholas Winterton who had chaired the Health Select Committee which examined the state of the maternity services in England in 1991, Baroness Julia Cumberlege who chaired the Expert Maternity Group, and diverse stakeholders including obstetricians, midwives, the National Childbirth Trust [NCT] and the Association for Improvements in Maternity Services [AIMs]. Professor Lesley Page, a panel discussant who sat on the Expert Maternity Group, commented that involvement in Changing Childbirth was the proudest moment of her career. Sir Nicholas Winterton argued however that, ground-breaking though the Report was, it was ultimately ‘unfinished business’. This was partly because as with all other initiatives, Changing Childbirth did not exist in a vacuum and implementation was affected by economic and service pressures as much as by philosophical considerations. The report does however provide a rich and powerful example of the value of creating a common vision between policy makers, public and professionals. Changing Childbirth resonated deeply because it captured and expressed an impetus in the maternity services about the importance of humanised and responsive care. In this commentary we will draw on evidence from the meeting to reflect on how and why the report developed when it did, and the extent to which it was able to fulfil its stated aims. We conclude by considering the lessons still to be learned from the development and impact of Changing Childbirth and the ways in which these might be used to inform the future of maternity care.

Two Tsadikim , Two Women in Labor, and One Salvation: Reading Gender in a Hasidic Story

The paper offers a feminist-gendered reading of a Hasidic story about R. Yisroel of Ruzhin, who intervenes in the case of a pregnant woman experiencing difficulty in labor. R. Yisroel of Ruzhin chooses storytelling as the means to help the woman, reciting a known Christian tradition about a female pope and her birth experience. A critical-gendered reading could view this story within the broader cultural phenomenon of labor being expropriated by men. The paper in addition suggests a subversive reading, which sees the story as a unique, disguised attempt at creating an appropriate place for birth within the greater culture. Focusing on the use of the strange papal story as a way of affecting salvation, the paper proposes a sephirotic-symbolic reading of the internal story: R. Yisroel of Ruzhin identified sparks of hesed in the story of the female pope and elevated them through the telling of the story, realizing the Hasidic mission of "raising the sparks". This Hasidic activity of "raising the sparks", the paper suggests, could also function as an interpretive methodology offering new perspectives on a patriarchal world and a patriarchal text, including the present story and the Hasidic tradition in general. The paper shows how through gender sensitivity and with the aid of the appropriate theoretical tools, a Hasidic text unfolds to reveal answers to new questions, and questions to new answers, opening a rich interpretive space while at the same time opening the door to tikun 'olam, repair of the world.

‘Alukura … for my daughters and their daughters and their daughters’. A review of Congress Alukura

Objective: To describe the process, findings and limitations of a review of Congress Alukura commissioned in 1998.Methods: Analysis of documents and reports, service use and perinatal data from Alukura and the Northern Territory Midwives Collection; interviews with staff of Congress Alukura, of Central Australian Aboriginal Congress, of Aboriginal community organisations in Alice Springs and remote communities, of health care providers and other key informants in Alice Springs; community consultations through women's meetings or group discussions in local and remote communities. Interviews were coded for thematic and content analysis.Results: Client visits increased by 42% from 1995/96 (2,130) to 1997/98. The proportion of women having a first trimester antenatal visit increased from 23% (1986–88) to 38% (1993–95). Mean birthweight of Aboriginal infants in the Alice Springs urban area was 3,168 g in 1986–90, 3,271 g in 1991–95, and 3,268 g in 1996–99. Other primary and maternity care providers perceived the quality of care to be high and saw Alukura playing a key role through transport, liaison, screening and follow‐up. Alukura was much less successful in its role as a place for birth. Expectations of additional outreach by local and remote communities were high.Discussion: The review's limitations included: a lack of direct input from young women, the main users of Alukura; a timeframe that precluded the detailed discussion necessary for seeking access to medical records, and the need for interpreters in community settings. Current and former staff who participated in the review often had other important community roles. Developments since the review are discussed briefly.

A Place for Burial, Birth and Bath

A Place for Burial, Birth and Bath

Who Invented the Modern Hospital and who Should Tell the Story?

Between 1880 and 1920 the center of medical practice in the United States moved from the home to the general hospital. The home ceased to be the normal place for birth, serious illness, and death as the family yielded another of its functions to strangers and experts. Morris J. Vogel's The Invention of the Modern Hospital is the first sophisticated historical monograph on one central aspect of the process of social differentiation in the United States. As Vogel demonstrates, the development of scientific medicine cannot, by itself, explain the rapid institution building in Boston, and presumably other urban centers, at the end of the nineteenth century. Rather, the modern hospital was, in part, another of the social welfare institutions, including public schools, orphanages, prisons, and insane asylums, created to serve the needs of a geographically mobile, urban population. Medical advances, and the needs of physicians intent on raising the status of their profession, did play a role in the rise of the modern hospital, but, to Vogel's credit, he is able to provide a complex explanation for the emergence of a now-familiar institution, and in doing so he reminds us that our social landscape was not shaped by technological imperatives but by conscious choices and by intense struggle between competing interests. In 1870 Massachusetts General Hospital resembled in essential respects the hospitals of thirteenth-century Europe as well as roughly one hundred other institutions in the United States. It was a charity whose patients were overwhelmingly the poor and those without roots in the community; dependence, as much as disease, distinguished them from the public at large (p. 1). Those who had families able. to care for them avoided hospitalization and the paternalism of Brahmin philanthropists, who debated the propriety of admitting the Irish in the 1860s but opened their wards to them when it became apparent that they provided a proportion of the industrial accident cases that could not be refused. The doctrine of Christian steward-