Midwifery: an Appropriate(d) Symbol of Women’s Reproductive Rights?

Synopsis – The prospect of midwifery legislation in the Canadian Province, Ontario, is investigated in light of other reproductive legislation, especially that concerning new reproductive technologies. The idea that midwifery symbolizes a woman-centered approach to birth is criticized and related to a number of reproductive issues in the hope that the lack of concern for and control by women can be exposed and overturned: the financial convenience of legislating midwifery in light of cutbacks to healthcare, the socialization of birth so that a male perspective on reproduction continues to rule women’s ability to control their actual procreative experience as well as to define its meaning, and the opposition of fetal personhood to the personhood of women.