I have made two surveys to investigate Western perceptions of childbirth. The first one had some issues in how it was written, as there were some ambiguous questions which confused my participants- for example, ‘There is no non-medical reason why a woman should refuse pain relief during labour. Do you agree?’ was very confusing as it contained a double negative. To improve this in my second survey, I changed the statement to ‘Women should accept pain relief during childbirth’ which is less ambiguous. Another problem was that the scales all went the same way; any ‘strongly agree’ answer indicated a more pro-medical person. This will have made my survey vulnerable to acquiescence bias, which I changed in the second survey, in which I asked questions in different ways. In the first survey I only collected quantitative data, but in the second I have both quantitative and qualitative data, allowing for a more rounded look at the issues. The only problem I have been unable to fix is that my respondents are mainly from the UK, which is a biased sample. However, there are respondents from the USA and Norway. Bearing this in mind, I would argue that my survey is a reliable source of information given that I have made every effort to eliminate bias and confounding variables.
Overwhelmingly, my survey has supporting evidence my theory that this culture has a fear of natural childbirth. The majority of respondents indicated that childbirth should happen in a hospital, with an average 60% agreement rate for this statement, whereas only 43% agreed that medical intervention should be avoided where possible. 64% agreed that women should always accept pain relief during labour, indicating a strong pro-medical attitude in our society. My open questions provided interesting results. For the question ‘Would you be afraid to give birth and why?’ some respondents said no, but the majority said yes. Reasons for this fear included ‘the amount of pain involved’, ‘the risk of tearing your vagina’, ‘it’s still dangerous’ and ‘afraid of losing the baby, or dying in childbirth’. Most respondents mentioned risk, which indicates that many people still consider childbirth to be frightening and dangerous. This is reinforced by the answers to my next question- ‘Do you feel childbirth is dangerous? Why?’ Many responses indicated the idea that childbirth is inherently risky: ‘even today people die or end up with permanent injury- most dangerous thing I’ve ever done’, and ‘yes as there are so many things that can go wrong’. Some respondents indicated that it is not dangerous anymore due to medical help: ‘no as there are always fully trained medical professionals if anything goes wrong’. Even this answer implies that childbirth is dangerous, if not in the presence of doctors. My final open question was ‘Is the Western medical model of childbirth superior to cultures that value home birth? Why?’ This produced very mixed responses. Most respondents said the Western model is safer: ‘I think both mother and baby are more likely to survive’, for example. Although some questioned the Western model, as one person said ‘the mother should feel comfortable wherever she gives birth’, the majority of answers show that people feel a medical model is the best model for childbirth.
Therefore, my survey has shown that people, at least in the UK, do tend to think of childbirth as dangerous, and a procedure that should be managed by medical professionals. Now, I’m interested in looking at where these perceptions may have come from, by analysing how childbirth is portrayed in the media.
Midwifery EPQ 