Robbie Davis-Floyd

Rice University · Department of Anthropology

This chapter describes my personal experiences as an applied anthropologist serving as the lead editor in the development of a set of international guidelines focused on improving quality of maternity care: the International Childbirth Initiative (ICI): 12 Steps to Safe and Respectful MotherBaby-Family Maternity Care (2018). The ICI’s purpose is to...

'Medical iatrogenesis' was first defined by Illich as injuries 'done to patients by ineffective, unsafe, and erroneous treatments'. Following Lokumage's original usage of the term, this paper explores 'obstetric iatrogenesis' along a spectrum ranging from unintentional harm (UH) to overt disrespect, violence, and abuse (DVA), employing the acronym...

Certainly there can be no argument against every woman being attended at birth by a skilled birth attendant. Currently, as elsewhere, the Ugandan government favors a biomedical model of care to achieve this aim, even though the logistical realities in certain regions mitigate against its realisation. This article addresses the Indigenous midwives o...

The global impact of COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 on Maternity Care Practices and Childbearing, including newborn and maternal health outcomes.

This chapter examines effective care in the immediate and long-term aftermaths of disasters that render the technocratic model of birth inapplicable in the absence of the technologies on which it relies. The “risks” normatively associated with childbirth under that model are subsumed by the risks generated by disasters. The chapter is based on writ...

We move beyond the language of risk and control to emphasize that birth offers a moment of renewal, resilience, and sustainable caregiving. We highlight the importance of sustainable and humanistic midwifery care in times of growing disruption including climate crises, global migration, political conflict, food scarcity, and rising social inequalit...

In this introductory chapter, we describe our volume as intersectional, human-rights oriented, transdisciplinary, science-driven, and community-based. We highlight and define key terms such as “sustainability” and “disruption” by showing how sustainable models of birth flexibly respond and adapt to disruptive times of rising social inequalities com...

This contributed volume explores flexible, adaptable, and sustainable solutions to the shockingly high costs of birth across the globe. It presents innovative and collaborative maternity care practices and policies that are intersectional, human rights-based, transdisciplinary, science-driven, and community-based. Each chapter describes participato...

This entry describes women's experiences of pregnancy across cultures. In every sociocultural—and political—setting, women's pregnancies are managed and regulated in accordance with local, regional, and national knowledge systems and beliefs about women's and men's roles in creating health and illness throughout gestation, childbirth, and the nurtu...

This article tells the story of the creation of the International MotherBaby Childbirth Initiative (IMBCI): 10 Steps to Optimal MotherBaby Maternity Services, a global initiative designed to improve childbirth care and birth and breastfeeding outcomes for all women, and of the organization and the individuals behind it. This initiative arose from a...

Book Reviews 607 how cultural values may impact the outcome of social markets. The book also elaborates on critical questions such as the use of information (e.g. ranking tables in school performance) or the occurrence of adverse selection. Still, the broadness of sectors and countries covered is also its biggest weakness , as the reader may be lef...

Este artículo describe la historia, principios y los 10 pasos de la Iniciativa Internacional por el Nacimiento MadreBebé (IMBCI), creado por la Organización Internacional por el Nacimiento MadreBebe, lanzado en marzo de 2008. La IMBCI A iniciativa internacional pelo nascimento MãeBebê: Uma abordagem de um atendimento materno eficiente à luz dos dir...

For more than 30 years, a significant part of the women’s health movement has repeat-edly asked for a re-appropriation of women’s bodies while birthing, coupled with a request for the de-medicalization of this important event for women. More recently, women’s rights have been emphasized in the domain of sexuality and reproduction for instance, the...

Once upon a time, there were six little pigs who set out to seek their fortunes in the world (okay, we know that in the original story there were only three, but just bear with us here!). Far away from home they journeyed, until the first little pig spied a peaceful meadow with a stream running through it; there he stopped his hot and weary journey...

In this article I interpret obstetric training as an initiatory rite of passage through which nascent obstetricians are socialized into the technological model of birth, the core value and belief system of American obstetrics. Interviews with obstetricians and obstetrical residents, as well as published accounts by physicians, are used to examine b...

The Center for the Adolescents of San Miguel de Allende (CASA), in the state of Guanajuato, central Mexico, has developed both birth and midwifery education models with concrete practicality and a judicious combination of science and caring. The CASA program began by offering contraceptives and family planning services provided through peer counsel...

This book takes us around the world in search of birth models that work in order to improve the standard of care for mothers and families everywhere. The contributors describe examples of maternity services from both developing countries and wealthy industrialized societies that apply the latest scientific evidence to support and facilitate normal...

Any effort to make sense of the complexities of contemporary midwifery must deal not only with biomedical and governmental power structures but also with the definitions such structures impose upon midwives and the ramifications of these definitions within and across national and cultural borders. The international definition of a midwife requires...

Embodied Progress:. Cultural Account of Assisted Conception. Sarah Franklin. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.252 pp.

This article presents the notion of the postmodern midwife, defining her as one who takes a relativistic stance toward biomedicine and other knowledge systems, alternative and indigenous, moving fluidly between them to serve the women she attends. She is locally and globally aware, culturally competent, and politically engaged, working with the res...

Preface: Normal childbirth has become jeopardized by inexorably rising interventions around the world. In many countries and settings, cesarean surgery, labor induction, and epidural analgesia continue to increase beyond all precedent, and without convincing evidence that these actions result in improved outcomes (1,2). Use of electronic fetal mon...

Midwifery in the developed world is in a state of ferment and change - a phenomenon referred to as the "new midwifery."Reconceiving Midwiferyoffers state-of-the-art analyses of the new midwifery as it is practiced. The authors - social scientists and midwifery practitioners - reflect on regional differences in the emerging profession, providing a s...

Exactly. Where the trained mechanics and their necessary tools are," agreed the doctor. "It's the same with the hospital. I can do my best work -and the best we must have in medicine all the time -not in some cramped little apartment or private home, but where I have the proper facilities and trained helpers. If anything goes wrong, I have all know...

This chapter investigates several aspects of individual and social resistance to the trends toward the technocratization of childbirth in the U.S. It considers other potential directions in American birthways, including the cultural significance of the systems-based wholistic model of birth. It expresses optimism about the expansion of the technocr...

Proponents of the global Safe Motherhood Initiative stress that primary keys to safe home birth include transport to the hospital in cases of need and effective care on arrival. In this article, which is based on interviews with American direct-entry midwives and Mexican traditional midwives, I examine what happens when transport occurs, how the ou...

This article describes three paradigms of health care that heavily influence contemporary childbirth, most particularly in the west, but increasingly around the world: the technocratic, humanistic, and holistic models of medicine. These models differ fundamentally in their definitions of the body and its relationship to the mind, and thus in the he...

This article describes three paradigms of health care that heavily influence contemporary childbirth, most particularly in the West, but increasingly around the world: the technocratic, humanistic, and holistic models of medicine. These models differ fundamentally in their definitions of the body and its relationship to the mind, and thus in the he...

This article documents the emergence of a new kind of midwife in Mexico, the thoroughly postmodern partera profesional. It traces the transnational conjunctures that facilitated her creation, illustrates aspects of her philosophy and praxis, and probes her ongoing articulations of identity. These women, who are of diverse sociocultural backgrounds,...

A distressing cross-cultural trend is showing up in the growing body of anthropological literature about midwifery and birth in the developing world. From Tanzania to Papua New Guinea, anthropologists who observe professional midwives giving prenatal care and attending births increasingly note that, far from the midwifery ideal, professional midwiv...

CONTRIBUTORS: Grace Bascope, Megan Biesele, Carole Browner, Beverley Chalmers, Elizabeth Davis, Robbie Davis-Floyd, Betty Anne Davis, Deborah Cordero Fiedler, Eugenia Georges, Amara Jambai, Kenneth C. Johnson, Brigitte Jordan, Sheila Kitzinger, Ellen Lazarus, Carol MacCormack, Stacy Leigh Pigg, Nancy Anne Press, Rayna Rapp, Carolyn F. Sargent, Paol...

Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction. Faye D. Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp. eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995 (cloth and paper), xii. 450 pages.

As defined by Jordan (1992, 1993[1978]), authoritative knowledge motivates decision and action. Based on interviews with 22 white middle-class midwives in the United States conducted between 1992 and 1993, this article explores the inner knowing that constitutes a primary source of authoritative knowledge for homebirthers but is granted no authorit...

I think that what we need to think about is how we can move from a situation in which authoritative knowledge is hierarchically distributed into a situation where it is, by consensus, horizontally distributed—that is, where all participants in the labor and birth contribute to the store of knowledge on the basis of which decisions are made. In our...

The dominant mythology of a culture is often displayed in the rituals with which it surrounds birth. In contemporary Western society, that mythology--the mythology of the technocracy--is enacted through obstetrical procedures, the rituals of hospital birth. This article explores the links between our culture's mythological technocratic model of bir...

Examines self- and body image as microcosmic mirrors of social relationships and worldview, based on interviews about pregnancy, birth, child-rearing, and career with 31 professional, career-oriented women. These women tend to see the body as an imperfect tool that the more perfect self should control, to experience pregnancy and birth as unpleasan...

Why do so many American women allow themselves to become enmeshed in the standardized routines of technocratic childbirth—routines that can be insensitive, unnecessary, and even unhealthy? This book is a second edition of the text. The new preface in this edition makes it clear that the issues surrounding childbirth remain as controversial as ever....

To a technological society like that of the United States, the natural process of childbirth presents special conceptual dilemmas, as it calls into perpetual question any boundaries American culture tries to delineate between itself and nature. The author builds on previous works in which she has argued that the American core value system centers a...

This article investigates the paradigm that provides the underlying rationale for the obstetrical management of birth in the United States. This paradigm, the technological model of birth, utilizes the assembly-line production of goods as its base metaphor for hospital birth. The basic tenets of this model, which include the Cartesian doctrine of m...

As proponents of the global Safe Motherhood Initiative have long stressed, in both the developing world where home birth is often a necessity and the developed world where it is a choice, primary keys to safe home birth include transport to the hospital in cases of need and effective care on arrival (Fullerton 2000). In this chapter, I examine what...

For past millennia, midwives have served women in childbirth. In premodern times, midwives were usually the only birth attendants. With the Industrial Revolution and the arrival of modernism, male physicians either replaced midwives or superceded them in the modernist medical hierarchy, leaving them with plenty of women to attend but with relativel...

I think EVERYTHING in the universe is interconnected. And there are some interconnections we haven't been conscious of, and they'll come out sooner or later. Probably later, because knowing the AMA's grip on things, it's going to take a long time, and it's going to take a lot of people who aren't afraid to speak out for what they really believe in....

The experience of pregnancy encompasses physiological, psychological, spiritual, and socio-cultural dimensions. Because the future of any given culture depends heavily on women's procreative abilities, these abilities carry strong social significance. Thus, every culture takes upon itself the regulation and management of women's pregnancies. In oth...

The developed world has transformed from industrialized societies organized around the production of goods by machines into technocracies—societies organized around evolution through the development of sophisticated technologies and the global flow of information through these technologies. Thus Davis-Floyd has labeled its dominant health care para...

This article analyzes the strategic and tactical use of folklore by the madam of a longstanding Texas whorehouse. (Known as the "Chicken Ranch," it was immortalized in the movie The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.) Goffman's explication of "facework" is used to illustrate how the madam maintains both "face" and full control of both her customers a...