Delivering the city's children: municipal programs and midwifery in Los Angeles

In 1915, at the height of a movement in the United States to regulate midwifery, health officials in the city of Los Angeles devised an unusual plan for doing so: they put the city itself in the midwifery business. At the same time that public health officials in Los Angeles enacted traditional regulatory legislation to deal with the "midwife problem," they also established a Division of Obstetrics within the city's health department to provide prenatal and postnatal care for the poor. Unlike the maternity dispensaries of other municipalities, Los Angeles provided physicians to attend home-births. Thus, rather than trying to move the delivery room out of the home, Los Angeles moved physicians in.