During the 1970s and 1980s, the effect of interventionist procedures was an object of study for many of those investigating maternity care. Sally McIntyre has described how the mid-1970s witnessed a vigorous public debate about obstetric practices: ‘[I]t seemed as though a dam of hitherto latent antagonism to the obstetric profession had burst, flooding medical, nursing and midwifery journals, the quality and popular press, television and, ultimately, parliament, with debate and controversy about obstetric practices’. Within this context the feminist sociologist Ann Oakley conducted a study of women's views of first-time motherhood based on interviews with fifty-five first-time mothers during their pregnancies, labour and deliveries, and experiences at five and twenty weeks postpartum, in the late 1970s. She found pregnant women were undergoing a hitherto unknown level of monitoring: 100 per cent of the mothers in the sample had taken drugs of one kind or another in pregnancy, 100 per cent had blood and urine tests, 68 per cent were given ultrasound, 19 per cent X-rays and 30 per cent had other tests. The average number of antenatal visits was thirteen.

The increasing medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth is a well-known story, but the aim of this chapter is to tease out the experiences of women themselves in order to consider the complexity of their responses. The chapter's findings are therefore based on seventy oral history interviews with women from Berkshire and Oxfordshire.