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The ‘Midwifery Question’ in Québec: New Problematics of Birth, Body, Self

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2007

Maria Fannin
Maria Fannin
Affiliation:
School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, University Road, Bristol BS8 1SS, UK E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Scholarship on midwifery in the North American context has tended to evaluate the recent legalization of the professional practice of midwifery across the United States and Canada as evidence of the success of women’s claims to broader reproductive rights concerning pregnancy and birth. This article, however, approaches the efforts to legalize midwifery in North America through the question of claims to reproductive autonomy, arguing that midwifery’s legalization is one effect of the entrance into modern scientific practice and state health policy of a new political subject: one whose emotional satisfaction is the target of reproductive health-care policy. As such, the ‘new’ midwifery in Québec encourages pregnant and birthing women to invest intimately in the project of staking claims for reproductive self-determination. Counter to claims that the ideal citizen of contemporary liberal regimes is ‘unattached and unbiased’, midwifery compels women to invest ‘deep down’ in claims to reproductive self-determination. An examination of policy and activist discourses circulating during the time leading up to the period of experimentation (1993–1998) and eventually to the legalization (1999) of midwifery in Québec provides a useful lens onto broader transformations in the liberal governance of pregnancy and birth.

Keywords

birthCanadamidwiferyobstetricsQuébecreproduction
Type
Articles
Information
BioSocieties , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , June 2007 , pp. 171 - 191
Copyright
Copyright © London School of Economics and Political Science 2007

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