Abstract
The role that midwives should fulfil in the maternity services has been the subject of much debate in the last decade, particularly in Europe and North America. This debate has had two main foci. First, differing views concerning the nature of childbirth have led to considerable disagreement about the appropriate roles to be fulfilled by the various professionals involved in maternity care. On the one hand, there has been an emphasis on childbirth as an essentially natural process to be assisted by midwives in their capacity as providers of normal maternity care, albeit with access to obstetric specialists as and when necessary. In contrast, others have focused on the potential abnormalities of childbirth, regarding it as a process requiring ongoing specialist medical expertise with assistance to be provided by nurses and/or midwives. The latter view has been in the forefront in recent years and has been associated with increased involvement of medical staff in normal maternity care and concomitant constraints on the role that the majority of midwives were once able to fulfil.