2017, Cilt 4, Sayı 2, Sayfa(lar) 076-083
Why Did Medicalization of Birth Increase, Can We Reduce It?
Gülşen VURAL1, Ayten Şentürk ERENEL2
1Yakın Doğu Üniversitesi Sağlık Bilimleri Fakültesi, Hemşirelik Bölümü, Lefkoşa, KKTC
2Gazi Üniversitesi Sağlık Bilimleri Fakültesi, Hemşirelik Bölümü, Ankara, Türkiye
Keywords: Intervention, medicalization, natural childbirth, pregnancy

In the past, child births were assisted by elder, wise women who had finalized their own fertile period, provided help with personal experiences and had no formal education. During this period some improvements to ease labor and labor pain, described as medicalization, emerged. As a result of medicalization, labor which used to be perceived as a natural phenomenon, started to be perceived as risky and began to be managed with advanced medical interventions. Nowadays, labors have been taking place with electronic fetal monitoring, enema, and episiotomy, cesarean section rates are increasing in parallel with these developments. As a result of medicalization of the labor, women are not making informed decisions about their pregnancy, labor takes place away from the home environment and costs of delivery increase. During labors taking place at the hospitals, baby’s interaction with the parents and other family members are delayed under the rules of the hospitals. For this reason, nowadays, medicalized births have been started to be questioned and the Ministry of Health in Turkey have taken precautions to lower cesarean births and support natural childbirth. Teamwork to support natural childbirth and prenatal care is important to provide quality prenatal services. Therefore, a women’s prenatal and intrapartum period should be followed up by the same (familiar) midwife/nurse. Nurse/midwife, physician and women should all feel confident about natural child birth.