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Masters Thesis
Choosing resistance: social power and alternative birth care in Sonoma County, California
Childbirth in Western societies is subject to near-total medical surveillance and control. The power of the dominant medical institution is such that alternative forms of pregnancy, birth, and neonatal care, such as midwife-attended intentional out-of-hospital birth, are often devalued, distrusted, and delegitimized. This thesis explores how choosing alternative forms of prenatal and birth care can be understood as a form of resistance to the biomedical model of birth and the institution of allopathic medicine. This thesis will also explore the ways in which social and economic factors mediate access to different reproductive opt ms, and how medical decision-making can also be understood as an expression of both social position, and of individual and group identities and value systems.
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