Obstetrical nurses

“A major reasons obstetric nurses were embraced by scientific medicine while lay midwives were not is that nurses were always careful to recognize and protect the physician’s authority even when fulfilling duties that were properly defined as medical obligations. The obstetric nurses accepted a dependent role, sanctioned by the authority of scientific medicine, that midwives refused. By assuming the delivery duty without the decision-making power to determine how the birth should be managed, nurses became firmly entrenched as subordinates in the medical sphere” (Rinker, 111-112). . . . By giving priority to science and the physician over individual attention to the patient the nurse compromised the traditional woman-to-woman connection that had made her so valuable a missionary of the gospel of good obstetrics. Once the public had been convinced to accept medical attendance at birth, the womanly attributes of the nurse were redirected to support physicians and medical procedures rather than the patient who was giving birth” (116).