The Medicalization of Birth and Death

Assuta Hospital maternity ward

The Medicalization of Birth and Death

By Lauren Hall

 

The Medicalization of Birth and Death, 2019JMC fellow Lauren Hall has recently written a book on American healthcare and medical practices:

Improving how individuals give birth and die in the United States requires reforming the regulatory, reimbursement, and legal structures that centralize care in hospitals and prevent the growth of community-based alternatives.

In 1900, most Americans gave birth and died at home, with minimal medical intervention. By contrast, most Americans today begin and end their lives in hospitals. The medicalization we now see is due in large part to federal and state policies that draw patients away from community-based providers, such as birth centers and hospice care, and toward the most intensive and costliest kinds of care. But the evidence suggests that birthing and dying people receive too much—even harmful—medical intervention.

In The Medicalization of Birth and Death, political scientist Lauren K. Hall describes how and why birth and death became medicalized events. While hospitalization provides certain benefits, she acknowledges, it also creates harms, limiting patient autonomy, driving up costs, and causing a cascade of interventions, many with serious side effects. Tracing the regulatory, legal, and financial policies that centralize care during birth and death, Hall argues that medicalization reduces competition, stifles innovation, and prevents individuals from accessing the most appropriate care during their most vulnerable moments. She also examines the profound implications of policy-enforced medicalization on informed consent and shows how medicalization challenges the healthcare community’s most foundational ethical commitments.

Drawing on interviews with medical and nonmedical healthcare providers, as well as surveys of patients and their families, Hall provides a broad overview of the costs, benefits, and origins of medicalized birth and death. The Medicalization of Birth and Death is required reading for academics, patients, providers, policymakers, and anyone else interested in how policy shapes healthcare options and limits patients and providers during life’s most profound moments.

Purchase the book from Johns Hopkins University Press or Amazon >>

 


 

Lauren HallLauren Hall is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Rochester Institute of the Technology. Her research interests include American politics and political development, politics of women and the family, evolutionary theory, and bioethics. In addition to The Medicalization of Birth and Death, she is the author of  Family and the Politics of Moderation: Private Life, Public Goods, and the Rebirth of Social Individualism (Baylor, 2014), as well as several pieces on the classical liberal tradition and the interaction between politics and social issues.

Professor Hall is a JMC fellow.

Learn more about Lauren Hall >>

 


 

Facebook iconTwitter iconFollow us on Facebook and Twitter for updates about lectures, publications, podcasts, and events related to American political thought, United States history, and the Western political tradition!

 


 

Want to help the Jack Miller Center transform higher education? Donate today.