Taking Back Birth: De/Medicalization and the Rhetoric of the Santa Cruz Birth Center

Abstract

In 1972, a group of lay midwives in Santa Cruz, CA published Birth Book – a text designed to raise awareness of home birthing practices through narratives, essays, and images. Birth Book functions as a central node in the alternative birth movement, as well as in broader social processes de/medicalizing childbirth. A rhetorical, movement-as-meaning approach demonstrates that Birth Book functions to shift public consciousness: presenting a coherent, alternative ideology of birth, displacing medical meanings and challenging medical authority, and enacting an embodied epistemology of birth.

Keywords:

• Alternative Birth Movement
• Collective Rhetoric
• Medicalization
• Narrative
• Social Movements

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Dr. Gordon Mitchell for his ongoing advice and support in revising this manuscript. In addition, many other colleagues generously read earlier versions and provided feedback, including: Dr. Olga Kuchinskaya, Alvin J. Primack, Steven Zwier, Jennifer Reinwald, Hillary Ash.