Too Posh To Push Childbirth Research Paper

Traditionally, childbirth has emphasized the joy of bringing a new life into the world. However, with the McDonaldization of healthcare, childbirth seems to be more about standardization over nature. Hospitals have begun to copy procedural ideas of major corporations and childbirth has begun to be centred on efficiency, predictability and control.

To generate more money, hospitals have placed focus on efficiency, taking a woman through childbirth as quickly as possible. As a result, standard, predictable procedures are necessary. Technology is being used at an increasing rate, acting as a control over the natural process of childbirth. Overall, it seems that selling the idea of care is more important than the care itself.

Throughout efficiency,
(Ritzer: 268) In other words, efficiency is the quickest route from point A to point B. For childbirth, it is the quickest delivery with the least amount of pain.

Hospitals have increased their efficiency by shortening stays after delivery, as well as by increasing their usage of medical interventions. Medical interventions include induced labours, epidurals, and caesarean sections. This move to efficiency has created a new social phenomenon that has been dubbed ?too-posh-to-push.? ?Too-posh-to-push? has resulted because more and more women are asking for the use of medical intervention. They want to have a baby, but they don?t want to go through the natural delivery nor do they want to stay in the hospital to recover.

Medical interventions are on a rise, but in-hospital recovery is in a serious decline. More women are opting for inducing labour and using epidurals, which put both mother and child at a higher risk, but hospital are sending them home earlier than they would have been even a decade ago. Before women used to stay, on average, 4 days after delivery, now they stay 1 or 2 days at most. With mother and child now having to face post-partum complications at home, emergency rooms have to pick up the slack of the maternity
The babies are given scores of 1 to 2 on five factors (for example, heart rate, colour), with 10 being the top (healthiest) total score. Most babies have scores between 7 and 9 a minute after birth, and 8 to 10 after five minutes. Babies with scores of 0 to 3 are in distress. (Ritzer: 274-275) Overall, the healthcare system has allowed itself to be McDonaldized and mothers-to-be have helped to keep McDonaldization with childbirth. By adopting procedural ideas from corporations, healthcare has become efficient, predictable, and controllable, but at a cost of increased risks, which have lead to inefficiencies, unpredictability, and uncontrollability within medicine. Mothers-to-be have helped to keep it by voluntarily opting for medical interventions, mainly caesarean sections, during childbirth, which has created a social phenomenon called too-posh-to-push. If every woman would opt to labour and delivery their child without medical interventions, the risks of complications would decrease dramatically and babies would be born