Supporting Women’s Alternative Birthing Choices: The Impact on Midwives and Maternity Services

Highlighting the experiences of midwives who provide care to women opting outside of guidelines in the pursuit of physiological birth, this book explores the impact on midwives themselves and examines how teams and organisations support or discourage women’s birth choices.

The Importance of Midwifery Care and Physiological Birth

The book begins by contextualising the importance of quality midwifery care, exploring current debates and demonstrating how hegemonic birth discourse and maternity practices have detrimentally affected physiological birth rates and the wellbeing of women who opt outside of maternity guidelines.

Facilitating Alternative Birthing Decisions

The author provides real-life examples of how midwives can facilitate a range of birthing decisions within mainstream midwifery services, revealing the challenges and benefits of delivering woman-centred care.

The Experiences of Midwives: Vulnerability, Conflict, and Stigmatisation

An exploration of midwives’ experiences of delivering such care is presented, revealing deeply polarised accounts from moral injury to job fulfilment. These accounts are then presented within a new model to explore how a midwife’s socio-political working context can significantly mediate or exacerbate the vulnerability, conflict, and stigmatisation that they may experience as a result of supporting alternative birth choices.

Implications and Recommendations for Maternity Services

The book explores the implications of the findings, looking at how team and organisational culture can be developed to better support women and midwives, making recommendations for a systems approach to improving maternity services.

This thought-provoking read is essential for all midwives and future midwives, as well as interprofessional concerns around workforce development, sustainability, moral distress, and compassion in health and social care.

Product Details:

Published by Routledge, 1st edition (February 28, 2023)

Language: English

Pages: 178

ISBN-10: 1032208279

ISBN-13: 978-1032208275