Medicalization, De-Medicalization, and Praxis

This chapter covers pleasurable birth experiences within medicalized and de-medicalized contexts and explores praxis across a spectrum of medicalization in childbirth. Herein, I frame medicalization as a mindset, rather than as a characteristic of any particular birth. Rather than assigning “medicalized” or “de-medicalized” categorizations to my study participants’ birth experiences (based on my own assessment of their respective birth settings, interventions, and the procedures that had been employed), I instead have intentionally chosen to privilege the participant’s view of their own birth as definitionally biomedical in nature (or not). I start with those who had viewed their births as fundamentally medical events and then move to those who’d shifted their views (which went only in the direction of de-medicalization), and finally to those who’d rebuked a biomedical frame for all their birth experiences. To conclude, I present additional analyses of those who’d not only had a de-medicalized mindset toward their births but had also relished in them, thereby deriving a particular kind of birth pleasure, pleasure in defiance , as a praxis for challenging the biomedical power over their birthing bodies.