I think you guys are kind of missing the point here, which is that our current ways of thinking about birth (which are largely based on debates about medicalization vs. non-medicalization and what does and doesn’t count as fitting into either category) are not the only ways to think about this … and, historically, haven’t been the ways we thought about this.
Case in point are the early 20th century feminists. They weren’t promoting medicalized birth, as we think about it, because that practice and that idea didn’t exist. Instead, they’re an example of a completely different historical perspective … one that doesn’t really look like anything happening currently. Without a medical industry telling them to feel that way, those women felt pain in labor. And some of them viewed the elimination of that pain as a human rights issue. I think that’s interesting.
