ABSTRACT
This chapter covers a period when the tone of the wider social debate around childbirth changed dramatically. It is bisected by the Changing Childbirth Report of 1993 written by a government-appointed ‘Expert Maternity Group’, which was created as a result of the Report of the Health Select Committee published in 1992 (known as the ‘Winterton Report’). Changing Childbirth has been credited with catalysing debate around care in pregnancy and during birth, and in revolutionising even the language used to frame it. In many ways, however, Changing Childbirth was not the break with the past that it at first appears and, as with previous government reports, it simply codified developments which were already underway. However, it was widely perceived at the time as being of seminal importance. This chapter will consider the reasons behind this and the legacy left by the Report. As well as altering the tone of the national discourse around birth, Changing Childbirth also impacted on the way in which midwifery viewed itself. By the late 1980s the profession – although there were debates as to whether it could even be described as such – was feeling increasingly beleaguered. It seemed beset on one side by the demands of high-technology obstetric care and on the other by the growing numbers of women articulating their demands for a particular type of care. The impact of Changing Childbirth on home birth or choice was probably, ultimately, more symbolic than real, but it did restore midwives to what they saw as their rightful place in the hierarchy of the maternity care system by making explicit that they were the guardians of ‘normality’.
