Ideas of risk in narratives of home birth: a study of South Wales c. 1948-1970.

Davies, Angela, Boyer, Kate ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8356-4412 and Hunter, Billie ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8064-3609 2025. Ideas of risk in narratives of home birth: a study of South Wales c. 1948-1970. The Welsh History Review 32 (3) , pp. 537-563. 10.16922/whr.32.3.4 Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

During the years 1948–70, the culturally accepted place of birth for Welsh women shifted. In the 1940s most Welsh women gave birth at home. By the 1970s it was a small minority. While the Welsh transition was particularly marked, it reflected a more general trend of hospital replacing the home as the usual place of birth across the UK. This article looks at how this move to hospital birth influenced the ways in which mothers and midwives thought about home birth. Based on a small oral history collection of interviews with fourteen respondents who lived or practiced in south Wales between 1948 and 1970, the article will analyse the ways in which risk in home birth were articulated by each group, and between the different individuals within these groups. It will consider what the risks of giving birth at home were, whether and how they were changing, and how the portrayal of risk in mothers' and professionals' stories of home birth compared with accounts of risk in hospital birth. While demonstrating the multiple understandings of risk people held, it will posit that, despite their different attitudes towards and experiences of home birth, risk became a common trope of narratives of home birth at this time.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Geography and Planning (GEOPL) Schools > Healthcare Sciences
Publisher:	University of Wales Press
ISSN:	0043-2431
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	3 July 2025
Date of Acceptance:	13 January 2025
Last Modified:	11 Jul 2025 16:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/179528

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