Why Did Medicalization of Birth Increase, Can We Reduce It?

In the past, child births were assisted by elder, wise women who had finalized their own fertileperiod, provided help with personal experiences and had no formal education. During thisperiod some improvements to ease labor and labor pain, described as medicalization, emerged.As a result of medicalization, labor which used to be perceived as a natural phenomenon,started to be perceived as risky and began to be managed with advanced medical interventions.Nowadays, labors have been taking place with electronic fetal monitoring, enema, and episiotomy, cesarean section rates are increasing in parallel with these developments. As aresult of medicalization of the labor, women are not making informed decisions about theirpregnancy, labor takes place away from the home environment and costs of delivery increase.During labors taking place at the hospitals, baby’s interaction with the parents and otherfamily members are delayed under the rules of the hospitals. For this reason, nowadays,medicalized births have been started to be questioned and the Ministry of Health in Turkeyhave taken precautions to lower cesarean births and support natural childbirth. Teamwork tosupport natural childbirth and prenatal care is important to provide quality prenatal services.Therefore, a women’s prenatal and intrapartum period should be followed up by the same(familiar) midwife/nurse. Nurse/midwife, physician and women should all feel confidentabout natural child birth.