Blog 8 - Childbearing & Childrearing

Questions: (1.) According to Hafner-Eaton and Pierce, what are the reasons why some prefer to give birth at home with the assistance of a midwife? What is your opinion about the best setting for giving birth? (2.) How did the legal ties between parents and children change over time? How did the adoption laws changed? Historically, what was the purpose of formal adoptions? (3.) According to Sharon Hays, what are the conservative and liberal views of welfare? What are the main differences between the requirements introduced by the welfare reform of 1996 and the earlier welfare policies? What are the two contradictory visions represented in the welfare reform? What does the welfare reform tell us about the values of our society? (4.) According to Block, Korteweg and Woodward, how do countries such as Norway understand poverty? And what is the prevailing theory of why poor people are poor in the United States? How does this theory operate as a self-fulfilling prophecy? According to the authors, what can we do to make American Dream more accessible to the poor? (5.) According to Clawson and Gerstel, how can we improve the child care system in the U.S.?

Many prefer to give birth at home with the assistance of a midwife rather than delivering in a hospital. Contrary to what many might believe, giving birth at home is as safe a practice as giving birth in a hospital. In fact, “at no time in the past or present and in no country have medical interventions made childbirth safer for most mother and babies” (816). For the majority of history midwives acted as the “baby catchers”, however in the 1700s male physicians began to replace female midwives. As a result of advances in technology, the profession began to require its own schools, many of which forbade the entry of women (815). “As the twentieth century progressed, physicians accrued increased “social” and “cultural authority” in addition to medical authority”; along with further technological advances obstetricians became more distant from their patients and “ensured that the process of birth itself is interpreted as inherently dangerous, requiring medical monitoring and intervention” (816).
Midwives, on the other hand, approach the process of childbirth with an entirely different attitude. They view the mother as an active, rather than passive, participant in the birth. Midwives believe that they are more attuned to the psychological and physical needs of women giving birth. Furthermore, “midwives have a noninterventionist philosophy and do not “deliver babies,” but instead teach women how to give birth” (819).
Overall, midwives and the home seem to provide a more conducive environment for childbirth rather than a hospital. In addition, many studies have demonstrated that home births are as safe, and sometimes safer, than hospital births which have encouraged many to give birth at home instead. For example, “studies clearly show that planned home births have lower intervention rates, lower complication rates, and lower morbidity rates than do either hospitals or unplanned home births” (818). Furthermore, the study also showed “that the hospital birth group had a more than tenfold increase in cesarean section delivery compared with the home births” (818).
Personally, I believe that childbirth is an experience that most women look forward to and thus should take place in an environment where the mother is most comfortable, whether that be in the home or the hospital. It is a subjective decision that the mother-to-be should decide. Midwives as well as obstetricians are both well trained and qualified for childbirth situations even if problems should arise.

Legal ties between parents and children have changed significantly over time. It is difficult to image today that at one point parental control over children continued as long as the children lived. However, over time there has been an evident trend that demonstrates “emancipating the child from its father and from the family in general” (272). Adults have less responsibility towards their parents in many respects. First, they are no longer obliged to obey their parents, and secondly, adults no longer have to worry about supporting their aging parents (because the government has taken over that duty). Adult children are also more likely to leave home and live by themselves. Government intervention in many once considered familial duties, like schooling, has definitely weakened the authority of the family.
In addition to the changes to the legal ties between parents and children, adoption laws have also experienced great modification. Many countries and cultures have different views of adoption. For example, English common law did not recognize adoption at all. The concept was so foreign to them because there was such an emphasis on “blood relations”. In contrast however, adaptation in Roman society was a well known feature which guaranteed that a family with no blood children would not die out. In France, there were two types of adaptation. First, there was simple adoption – which essentially allowed families to adopt (even adults) in order to carry on the family name. The second type of adoption was full adoption – which always involved adopting young children by adoptive parents who were almost always childless. In the United States the first adoptive laws were passed in Massachusetts in 1851. “Adoption laws reject the classic common law understanding that blood relationship is crucial, and that people are joined by blood or marriage or not all” (274). Adoption laws were also very concerned with inheritance and the right to property. Initially there was a distinction made between biological children and adoptive children and usually the latter would be disadvantaged. However, now there is no distinction made between children who were adopted and children who were biological offspring.
Initially in Missouri, the procedure for adopting was analogous to the procedures of buying a cornfield. However, in 1917 Missouri enacted a more modern adoption law “instead of a deed, adoption now required a court proceeding; the judge was to decide whether the adoptive parents were of good character and of sufficient ability to properly care for, maintain and educate said child, and if the welfare of said child would be promoted by the adoption” (275). The adoptive parents had rights too. For example, “adoptive parents had the option to annul the adoption if within five years the child developed feeble mindedness or epilepsy or venereal infection” (275).
Today there is a great difficulty in making fair laws, protecting the child as well as the rights of the birth mother and the adoptive parents, especially when adoption decisions are heavily influenced by social norms and prejudices.
Historically, the purpose of formal adoptions was to meet the best interests of the child. When children of the city were orphaned they were sent to the country to live with farm families. However, “the farm families rarely adopted these children legally, in many cases, they were little better than servants, cheap labor for the farm” (276).

The conservatives and liberals of the United States have extremely different views on welfare. In Hays’ article she states that the majority of conservatives “accused welfare recipients of being lazy, promiscuous, and pathologically dependent, and they argued that the welfare system encouraged those bad values with overly generous benefits and permissive policies that provided incentives for family dysfunction and non-work. According to these thinkers, the welfare system thereby not only perpetuated poverty but, by promoting laziness and single parenting, actually caused it to increase” (12). Liberals agree with the conservatives that there are definitely problems with the welfare system however, “they have consistently argued that any problems of morality that existed among poor families were primarily the result, rather than the cause, of economic hardship” (12).
There have been some changes made in the welfare system along the years but the main differences in the new system were the results of the “feminization of poverty, the increase in single parenting and the changing shape of the workforce and economy” (14). In 1996 welfare changed dramatically renaming welfare as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). Along with the renaming a number of other changed were implemented. For example, there was an “absolute demand that mothers participate in the paid labor force, offering no exceptions to the more “virtuous” or more vulnerable women among them” (15). There were also federal time limits placed on benefits. For example, “after five years, all welfare recipients are expected to be self sufficient – and no matter how destitute they might be, they will remain ineligible to receive welfare assistance for the rest of their lives” (16). The increase of single mothers on welfare has also initiated the government to removing the safety net of welfare benefits which they believe will make welfare mothers rethink their commitment to marriage and the family.
The two contradictory visions represented in the welfare reform are the Work Plan and the Family Plan. “In the Work Plan, work requirements are a way of rehabilitating mothers, transforming women who would otherwise “merely” stay at home and care for their children into women who are self-sufficient, independent, productive members of society. The Family Plan, on the other hand, uses work requirements as a way of punishing mothers for their failure to get married and stay marred” (19).
The welfare reform tells us a lot about the society we live in. Our society is made up of a diverse group of people who have conflicting ideas about how to solve the problems that we all face. Although, it is good that they are working to elevate our troubles it is evident that compromise is not possible. It also seems a little unfair because people in the government, who are creating these reforms, tend to usually be from middle to upper class backgrounds, and have no true conception about what it is like to be a poor single mother who wants to care for her family but is forced to work numerous jobs.

Many other countries, including Norway, believe that poverty is not caused by bad behavior, but rather “they assume that it is caused by economic and structural factors” (17). For example, “the fact that single-parent households are more common in the United States than in many of these countries where the poor receive greater assistance undermines the claim that more generous policies will encourage more single women to have children out of wedlock” (17). Opposite of Norway, the prevailing theory of why people are poor in the United States is rooted in bad behavior. The majority view African-American and Hispanic women and men, as well as single mothers of all ethnicities, (who are disproportionately represented among the poor) as people who are morally deficient. They argue that “poor people bear children irresponsibly and that they lack the work ethic necessary for economic success” (16). Furthermore, the poor “are scolded and told that they have caused their own misfortunes” (14).
This prevailing theory, that poverty is rooted in immorality, operates as a self-fulfilling prophecy because when help is reduced and becomes inadequate, “the poor can no longer survive by obeying the rules; they are forced to break them…as a result these infractions become the necessary proof that “the poor” are truly intractable and their desperate situations are rightly ignored” (14).
Block, Korteweg, and Woodward offer a couple of suggestions that put the possibility of achieving the American Dream back into the reach of the poor. One of these suggestions is that our society move toward a more universal way of thinking in areas such as health care, higher education, high-quality health care, and housing. In addition, they also suggest that the government reforms policies that target the poor more directly. For example, this includes restoring the value of the minimum wage and making sure that the minimum wage rises with inflation. Finally, the authors tell us that to make all these suggestions feasible, society needs true compassion. Our society needs to recognize “that we have a collective responsibility to ensure that in the wealthiest nation in the world there are not million of people going hungry, millions without health insurance, and hundreds of thousands without homes.

Dan Clawson and Naomi Gerstel present the child care systems in France and other European countries as a model in which the United States should strive to emulate. By comparing the different systems Clawson and Gerstel came up with a couple suggestions to improve the child care system in the United States. For example, “the programs would be publicly funded and universal, available to all, either at no cost or at a modest cost with subsidies for low income participants. The staff would be paid about the same as public school teachers. Participation in these programs would be voluntary, but the programs would be of such high quality that a majority of children would enroll. Because the quality of the programs would be high, parents would feel much less ambivalence about their children’s participation, and the system would enjoy strong public support” (34-35). In addition, all parents would be offered a significant period of paid parental leave. Clawson and Gerstel stress that although the cost of this kind of system would be expensive it would be economically smart in the long run because “not caring for our children is in the long term, and probably even in the short term, even more expensive” (35).