Midwifery in the Netherlands: Vestige or vanguard?

Abstract

The midwifery system of the Netherlands, where nearly one‐third of births occur at home, is widely admired by birth activists. Why has the Netherlands maintained this way of birthing babies when all other European countries have shifted to hospital‐based maternity care? In this article, I examine the societal forces ‐ both structural and cultural ‐ that allowed the Dutch to hold on to a way of delivering maternity services that other modernizing nations discarded earlier in the first half of the 20th century.