Risk and Uncertainty in Maternity Care

This book examines how risk is defined and employed in the delivery of maternity care across the world and reflects critically on how the management of risk shapes the organization and experience of maternity services. The authors challenge taken-for-granted understandings of risk in maternity care and early parenting, showing how risk is not simply a value-free assessment of potential harms but is, in fact, a complex, socially and politically way of seeing, knowing about, and performing pregnancy and birth. The information presented here invites the reader to rethink the social and economic risks in maternity care, challenge the assumption that responses to risk are uniform, see the political uses of risk in maternity care, and reconsider the value of risk management. Finally, the book offers a substantial and up-to-date summary of new and important theoretical understandings of risk and uncertainty in maternity care. In these pages, students and practitioners in the fields of health, medicine, midwifery, and the social sciences will find both practical information about and deeper insights into the social aspects of the delivery of health care.

Mandie Scamell is Senior Lecturer in Midwifery at City and St Geoge's University of London, and specializes in risk and the maternity services in the UK. Her main area of work has been on midwifery care in the UK, with particular interests in clinical governance and institutionalized risk management technologies and in the culture and organization of maternity care.

Kirstie Coxon is Reader in Maternity Care at University of Central Lancashire, UK. A midwife by background, she researches risk in maternity care, risk and decision-making, and sociocultural theories of risk since completing.

Raymond De Vries is Professor emeritus in the Department of Learning Health Sciences and the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Michigan. He is also Visiting Professor emeritus at CAPHRI School for Public Health and Primary Care, University of Maastricht, the Netherlands. His interests include the social, ethical and policy issues associated with the medicalization of pregnancy and birth.