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Laboring Women, Coaching Men: Masculinity and Childbirth Education in the Contemporary United States
- Hypatia
- Indiana University Press
- Volume 18, Number 3, Summer 2003
- pp. 113-134
- Article
- Additional Information
Hospitals have adopted a rhetoric of family-centered maternity care, and one of the ways in which they show their commitment to it is through the integration of the husband-as-coach model of childbirth (the Bradley method) into delivery practices. I argue that this model's widespread popularity testifies less to the culture's endorsement of a woman-centered approach than to healthcare's appropriation of "natural" childbirth as a site for the production and reproduction of patriarchal and capitalist power.