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American Midwifery Litigation And State Legislative Preferences For Physician-Controlled Childbirth, Stacey A. Tovino

Scholarly Works

From the colonial period to the Great Depression, lay midwives attended a large proportion of deliveries that occurred in the United States. As late as 1900, midwife-attended home births accounted for approximately one-half of all births in the United States. By 1950, however, physicians attended more than eighty percent of all deliveries in the hospital setting. Historians have analyzed and interpreted birth statistics, medical textbooks, medical school curricula, minutes of medical society meetings, public health reports, articles in medical journals and popular magazines, letters from laboring mothers, diaries of midwives, legislative committee reports, and state legislation to identify issues of …