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Delivering Quality Care: The Roles And Future Of Midwives In Southern California, Abigail Jones May 2012

Delivering Quality Care: The Roles And Future Of Midwives In Southern California, Abigail Jones

Scripps Senior Theses

The United States is ranked 27th in the world for maternal mortality, yet spends twice as much on maternity care services as countries with better maternal health indicators. Stuck in a technocratic and physician-dominated maternity care system, the U.S. depends on expensive technologies to control birth out of fear of pain and litigation, costing Americans billions of dollars and depriving women of the opportunity to have a transformative birth experience. Through an analysis of the medicalization of birth and the current biomedical model in birth, in conjunction with open-ended interviews with 5 hospital midwives and 3 homebirth midwives, the …


An Investigation Of The Effects Of Pitocin For Labor Induction And Augmentation On Breastfeeding Success, Megan J. Lewis Apr 2012

An Investigation Of The Effects Of Pitocin For Labor Induction And Augmentation On Breastfeeding Success, Megan J. Lewis

Scripps Senior Theses

Rates of labor induction and augmentation have been increasing in recent decades (Glantz, 2005). According to the Listening to Mothers II survey, half of all labors in the U.S. are induced or augmented with Pitocin or other synthetic form of the hormone oxytocin (Declercq et al., 2006). Oxytocin, a naturally occurring hormone released in the pituitary gland, is involved in the stimulation of uterine contractions during labor and in the milk ejection reflex during breastfeeding, and research suggests it also has various effects on the brain, such as eliciting maternal behavior. However, studies have shown that exogenous oxytocin can interfere …