Doctoral Dissertation Research: Legal and Regulatory Inconsistency at the Community Level

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Title: Doctoral Dissertation Research: Legal and Regulatory Inconsistency at the Community LevelAbstract: Many professions in the U.S exist in a legal context of regulatory inconsistency across the various jurisdictions in which the practice operates, leading to a lack of stability regarding the legality of those professions. A prime example concerns how childbirth occurs in the U.S, as more families seek alternatives to standard hospital-based, obstetrician-attended medicated birth, such as home birth. Certified Professional Midwives, the professional providers specifically trained to provide care to the growing community of families choosing home birth, are regulated by enormously varied laws and policies. This project will investigate the legal setting of home birth midwifery in the context of varied communities of practice and their responses to differing regulatory frameworks.Using mixed-methods to analyze the inconsistent legal environment of home birth, the project will employ an ethnographic approach, including in-depth interviews and analysis of archival data collected across varied jurisdictional contexts. The study will investigate responses to a lack of stability about state treatment of expertise that characterizes the regulatory context of home birth. The research design includes participant observation centered around the practices of home birth professionals in several field sites. Ethnographic research will be supplemented by interviews with officials charged with regulating the practice of home birth midwifery and with other members of the professional networks of home birth midwives. Findings will contribute to an understanding of the relationship between legal consciousness, regulatory arrangements, and the politics of expertise and professionalization. Additionally, the project will provide implications of existing regulatory strategies by illuminating how practitioners respond to the various models of licensure currently in use across the country.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.