African American Women Turn to Hospital Birth

Abstract

Once given an option African American women in the south chose physician managed hospitalized childbirth, but their experience was generally unsatisfactory for the reasons explored in this chapter. Dr. Thomas Boulware’s five-year maternal mortality study in Alabama is used to highlight physician opposition to funding prenatal clinics in poor, rural counties. The situation was no better in the segregated facilities of labor and delivery wards, or in the care black women received in hospital. Despite racism featuring heavily in their experience of macro-level care African American women’s expectations of childbirth changed and with it the culture.