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Research article summary:
Burning bridges: policy, practice, and the destruction of midwifery in rural Costa Rica.
Abstract Extract:
The trend toward hospitalization of birth has a long history in Costa Rica and currently approximately 98% of births take place in the clinical setting. Impoverished rural areas, like the town of Buenos Aires, lag behind national trends and only recently ... (Full abstract text below) Published 2003May
in Journal: Soc Sci Med
(Language : eng)
Full Pubmed Extract
This information was retrieved, real-time, on your behalf from the public area of the Pubmed website:
1. Soc Sci Med.
2003 May;56(9):1893-909
Burning bridges: policy, practice, and the destruction of midwifery in rural Costa Rica.
Jenkins GL
Department of Anthropology, 622 Fraser Hall, Lawrence, 1415 Jayhawk Boulevard, University of Kansas, KS 66049-7556, USA. gjenkins@ukans.edu
The trend toward hospitalization of birth has a long history in Costa Rica and currently approximately 98% of births take place in the clinical setting. Impoverished rural areas, like the town of Buenos Aires, lag behind national trends and only recently has birth moved from the home to the hospital. Costa Rica's midwife certification program co-opted rural midwives as bridges to biomedicalization, responsible for both pushing women into the biomedical setting and filling the gaps left by a limited national health care system. Despite the eventual illegalization of key practices and of home birth itself, local use of midwives' services continues, albeit with local demands that have transformed midwives into bridges to biomedical care in ways unanticipated by and invisible to national programmers. Midwives provide key services like prenatal massage, treatment of pregnancy crises, and attending unforeseen home births and women unable to afford the modest costs of hospitalization. Yet, midwives report increasing dissatisfaction and the desire to stop providing services in their communities. Practices like prenatal massage are in demand, but are no longer embedded in a system of local exchange that is socially and economically meaningful. Midwives blame their clientele for their dissatisfaction, but directly link these changes to the notions of professionalism, compensation, and changing community values. Thus, the social relationship between midwives and their clients must also be understood as a destructive force burning midwifery as a bridge to safe birth. In this essay, I argue that the process of both remodeling and subsequently destroying midwifery practices begun in the formal health care sector at the national level continues at the local level through changing values and meanings associated with midwives' practices.
PMID : 12650728 [PubMed - Indexed for MEDLINE]
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Full Author Information
| First Name | LastName | Initials |
| Gwynne L | Jenkins | GL |
Affiliation: Department of Anthropology, 622 Fraser Hall, Lawrence, 1415 Jayhawk Boulevard, University of Kansas, KS 66049-7556, USA. gjenkins@ukans.edu
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MESH categories and related page links
This article was linked to the MESH categories shown on the left below. The links on the right are related Memletics pages.
Category links from this article:- Anthropology, Cultural
- Attitude to Health - ethnology
- Certification - legislation & jurisprudence
- Costa Rica
- Culture
- Delivery Rooms - utilization
- Female
- Home Childbirth - legislation & jurisprudence
- Hospitalization
- Humans
- Interpersonal Relations
- Interviews as Topic
- Massage
- Midwifery - education, legislation & jurisprudence, standards, trends
- Personal Autonomy
- Power (Psychology)
- Pregnancy
- Prenatal Care - methods
- Rural Health Services - legislation & jurisprudence
- Social Control Policies - legislation & jurisprudence
- Social Values
- Sociology, Medical
- World Health Organization
| | Related Memletics topics: |
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