The editor of this volume takes on the challenging task of presenting an encompassing view of childbirth in America from an anthropological perspective. The book is indeed comprehensive. . . . Collectively the chapters in Childbirth in America lay out a representative sketch of research problems of interest to sociocultural anthropologists and other social scientists working in the area of reproductive health. A distinct accomplishment is the acknowledgement in some of the chapters that not all American women want the same kind of childbirth care or have the same values and attitudes about pregnancy, birth, and parenting, and that this variation needs addressing in both childbirth policy and practice. American Journal of Physical Anthropology A comprehensive and critical examination of the experience of childbirth in America today, from pregnancy to early postpartum. This book covers many controversial issues in the context of diverse cultural, social, and economic backgrounds, which have arisen as a result of the new technologies and ideologies surrounding pregnancy and birth. Most useful as a text for courses in childbirth education, anthropology of women's health, and anthropology of medicine.

Hanson explores the different ways in which pregnancy has been constructed and interpreted in Britain over the last 250 years. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including obstetric texts, pregnancy advice books, literary texts, popular fiction and visual images, she analyzes changing attitudes to key issues such as the relative rights of mother and fetus and the degree to which medical intervention is acceptable in pregnancy. Hanson also considers the effects of medical and social changes on the subjective experience of pregnancy.

Today, cohabiting relationships account for most births outside marriage. But what was the situation in earlier centuries? Bringing together leading historians, demographers and lawyers, this interdisciplinary collection draws on a wide range of sources to examine the changing context of non-marital child-bearing in England and Wales since 1600.

The history of Asian immigrants in Canada is more than a century old, and the number of persons of Asian descent has more than doubled over the past fifteen years, yet until now there has been no systematic study of these Asian-born Canadians. Using specifically obtained demographic data from Statistics Canada, Shiva S. Halli has investigated differences in family size among Asian ethnic groups in Canada in order to examine inter-group differences and to pinpoint causes for such variations. The author examines the context of fertility differentials by looking at social, cultural, and historical backgrounds, and attempts to utilize the minority status hypothesis, which was originally applied to ethnic groups in the United States, to explain differences in Asian ethnic fertility in Canada.

This book explores the experiences of pregnant teenagers, their partners, and midwives, from pregnancy realisation through the early years of motherhood. It examines changing attitudes to female sexuality and moral discourses on adolescent subjectivity especially as these pertain to teenage motherhood.

In this dazzling collection of over 200 photos of pregnant women taken from art libraries, childbirth manuals, maternity ads, contemporary art, and personal albums, the authors explore the paradox between image and reality. The photos illuminate how society creates feminine roles through the institution of pregnancy-and how women resist such roles.

This is a study of the work and life of district midwives from 1948 to 1972 in Nottingham, which was one of the last UK cities to build a central maternity unit. The author statistically examines the outcome of home births in the area, taking into account the Parliamentary Reports of 1992 and 1993 and demonstrating the safety and value to society of district midwives.

This timely and fascinating feminist ethnography is the first of its kind to focus on commercial surrogacy workers in Russia and from other countries of the former Soviet Union. Examining surrogacy workers' reproductive labour, and experiences of stratification and migration, the study presents innovative insights into current research on global surrogacy practices and travels for assisted reproduction. It links to wider fields of studies, such as ethnicity, feminism, women's and gender studies in the post-Soviet sphere. Weis expertly brings together rigorous ethnographic research, feminist debates and anthropological theory to explore the attributed significance of origin, citizenship, race, ethnicity and religion, and the cultural framing and social organization of surrogacy as an economic exchange; thereby challenging and contributing to the discourse of surrogacy as a gift, a labour of love, a maternal sacrifice or work. Tracing surrogacy workers' journeys for surrogacy work across Russia, Weis introduces geographic and geopolitical stratifications as two new lenses of stratified reproduction to analyse how surrogacy in Russia builds on and propels surrogacy workers' mobility and results in reproductive migrations. Given the rapid global increase in the use of surrogacy and its increasingly internationalised nature, Weis's research has implications for surrogacy users, medical practitioners and regulators, as well as researchers concerned with (cross-border) surrogacy, reproductive stratifications and reproductive justice. Shortlisted for the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize 2022

Drawing on never before used archival materials, Replacing the Dead exposes the history of Soviet and Russian abortion policy. It is not unusual for nations recovering from wars to incentivize their populations to raise their birthrates. The post-World War II Soviet pronatalism campaign attempted this on an unprecedented scale, aiming to replace a lost population of 27 million. Why, then, did the USSR re-legalize abortion in 1955? Mie Nakachi uses previously hidden archival data to reveal that decisions made by Stalin and Khruschev under the rubric of 'family law' created a society of broken marriages, "fatherless" children, and abortions, each totaling in the tens of millions. The government reversed laws regarding paternal responsibility, thereby encouraging men to impregnate unmarried women and widows, and blocked available contraception, overriding the advice of the medical establishment. Some 8.7 million out-of-wedlock children were born between 1945 and 1955 alone. In the absence of serious commitment to supporting Soviet women who worked full-time, the policy did extensive damage to gender relations and the welfare of women and children. Women, famous cultural figures, and Soviet professionals initiated a movement to improve women's reproductive health and make all children equal. Because Soviet leaders did not allow any major reform, an abortion culture grew among Soviet women and spread throughout the Soviet sphere, including Eastern Europe and China. Based on groundbreaking research, Replacing the Dead traces how the idea of women's right to an abortion emerged from an authoritarian society decades before it did in the West and why it remains the dominant method of birth control in present-day Russia.

This study examines the legal discrimination suffered in the United States by children born out of wedlock. The authors analyze the Supreme Court's equal protection birth status decisions from 1968 to 1992 and, in a case-by-case analysis, trace the development of the Court's rulings, examine the pattern of equal protection tests utilized, and evaluate the consistency of the Court's position. In addition, the work examines the related discrimination suffered by the families of non-marital children, especially single parents and alternative family units, and concludes that it is impossible to gain full equality for children born out of wedlock unless equality is also gained for their family unit. Toward these ends, the authors suggest a feminist jurisprudence as a methodology for addressing the underlying issue at the crux of birth status distinctions.

Women's experience of childbirth in the mid-twentieth century, revealed in their own words. For pregnant women in the 1930s and 1940s Dr. Grantly Dick-Read (1890-1959) proposed natural childbirth as the "normal" way to have babies, making drugs, instruments and hospitalization unnecessary. His book Childbirth withoutFear, first published in 1933, spoke of the joys of natural childbirth; women from around the world wrote long, detailed, and poignant letters in response, describing their own experiences in giving birth. This edited collection of the correspondence affords a rare look at childbirth experiences in the hospitals and birthing centers in post-war America and Britain from the perspective of the patient, as women discuss the way they were viewed bysociety, by hospitals, and by physicians and nurses, and their own feelings on childbirth; overall, the book provides an important opportunity to evaluate the treatment of women in the 1940s and 1950s, the generation who gave birth to the so-called "baby boomers." Professor MARY ALVEY THOMAS teaches at Bentley College, Waltham.

Reproductive Governance and Bodily Materiality explores the growing centrality and power of the medical professional and lay practices within the field of human reproduction as they entangle with political economic processes, providing examples from multiple countries. Throughout the collection the authors address the issues of abortion, sterilization, 'natural' childbirth, breastfeeding, surrogacy, pregnancy loss, IVF, disability and parenting, whilst focusing both on the mechanisms through which reproductive behaviours are shaped and controlled, and on the socially and culturally constructed bodies' materiality. The chapters analyse how reproductive governances are inherently attached to different social life aspects, such as gender, industry, and religion, residing within complex political domains and how these features are embodied through practices, care, rituals, and gestures. Rather than assuming corporeal materiality - the 'flesh' - as something stable and pre-given, this collection shows how different bodies are defined and shaped by local biologies, institutional practices and reproductive subjects inside and outside the Euro-American space. This is essential reading for researchers of social, cultural and medical anthropology, sociology, and education.

Since the 1970s, alarming discourses about declining fertility and the difficulties of balancing work and family have flourished in Western countries. Captured by the notion of the 'biological clock', they put women's reproductive age and the fertility decline to the centre of public and medical attention. Reproductive biomedicine constitutes a specific domain invested with hopes for technological and medical answers and a new market for fertility extension technologies, such as egg donation and social egg freezing. Addressing long-standing questions about the articulation of the biological and the social in the making of bodies and identities, this book questions the nature of reproductive ageing, a taken for granted 'fact of life' at the core of reproductive biomedicine. What is the biology of the 'biological clock' made of and how can we account for its embodied reality from a feminist perspective? Opening the black box of the biological, the book makes a way between essentialism and constructivism with the aim of accounting for its materiality, while also illuminating its political implications. By following the ontological choreographies of age-related infertility in the science and medicine of reproduction, this study explores how age materializes and documents what happens when reproduction meets ageing. Deeply transdisciplinary, it questions what is fixed about the biology of the fertility decline in a way which adds complexity to debates about the biomedicalization of reproductive ageing.

>Human reproduction is mediated through many technologies, both high- and low-tech. These technologies of reproduction are not experienced in isolation by most of the people who use them. However clinical, public health and social scientific research often reflects a parcelling out of reproduction into specialist areas of biomedical intervention. Studies tend to be bound to specific physiological events, technologies (particularly those that are more obviously technical or 'modern') and people - namely cis, heterosexual, white, middle-class women. Yet, with the ever-expanding horizon of reproductive technologies and the rapid development of the fertility industry, the reality is that many individuals will engage with more than one such technology at some point in their life. >Technologies of Reproduction Across the Lifecourse presents dialogue between scholars on different reproductive technologies not only from a comparative empirical perspective, arguing that operating in disciplinary silos and working from narrow ideas about RTs and their meanings can put reproductive studies in danger of missing, and thereby reproducing, the kinds of power structures that shape reproductive life.

In this original and highly accomplished study, first published in 1994, Marie Maclean studies the writings of social rebels and explores the relationship between their personal narratives and illegitimacy. The case studies which Maclean examines fall into four groups: those which stress alternative family structures and 'female genealogies' those which pair female illegitimacy and revolution those which question the deliberate refusal of the name of the father by the legitimate those which study the revenge of genius on the society which excludes it Skilfully interweaving feminist theory, French literary criticism, social and cultural history, deconstruction and psychoanalytic theory, Maclean traces the place of these personal narratives of illegitimacy in history and their use in theory, from Elizabeth I to Freud, Sartre and Derrida. The Name of the Mother will be of vital interest and importance to any student of critical theory, feminist philosophy, French or cultural studies.

In the contemporary world, the unborn - human embryos and foetuses - are highly public and contested figures. Their visual images appear across a wide range of forums, from YouTube videos to pregnancy handbooks. They have become commercial commodities as part of the IVF industry, reproductive tourism and stem cell research and regenerative medicine. The unborn are the focus of intense debates concerning concepts of personhood and humanness, especially in relation to abortion politics and the use and disposal of embryos created outside the human body. The Social Worlds of the Unborn is the first book-length work to discuss all of these issues and more, drawing on social and cultural theory and research and empirical research to do so. It will be of interest to academics and students in a multitude of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, philosophy, bioethics, gender studies, media and cultural studies and science and technology studies.

What does it mean to have a child born through donor conception? Does it mean different things for heterosexual parents and lesbian parents? What is it like for the 'non-genetic' parent? How do grandparents feel about having a grandchild who is conceived with the help of an egg, sperm or embryo donor? Since 1991 more than 35,000 children have been born in the UK as a result of donor conception. This means that more and more families are facing the issue of incorporating 'relative strangers' into their families.
In this path breaking book, the authors explore the lived reality of donor conception in families by using in-depth interviews with parents and grandparents of donor conceived children. With reproductive medical technologies becoming more accessible, assisted donor conception is raising new and important questions about family life. This book will provide compelling reading for all those interested in the family, kinship, gender and sexuality, new reproductive technologies, and genetics.

Growing attention has focused on the education of children in the child welfare system, particularly those in foster care, but ninety-two percent of children in the child welfare system stay with their parents and their educational needs receive little attention. Succeeding Together? is an institutional ethnography that analyses front-line accounts from mothers, teachers, and child welfare workers to explore the educational issues facing abused and neglected children outside of foster care. Kelly Gallagher-Mackay examines the complex policy framework and underlying assumptions that shape the practice of collective responsibility for this vulnerable group, shining a light on the implications of their status in-between private and public responsibility. Gallagher-Mackay breaks down collective responsibility into three areas: surveillance and the duty to report, child welfare's poorly defined responsibility to provide educational supports, and the privatized nature of teachers' professional responsibility for caring. The involvement of child welfare represents a public judgment that there should be strong, proactive, and coordinated intervention to ensure protection and well-being. Succeeding Together? reveals significant shortfalls in coordination and commitment to the well-being of society's most vulnerable.

Declining global male fertility rates has generated increased attention on male fertility in recent years. Simultaneously, individualised responsibility for health has been growing. Fertility and lifestyle have therefore become seemingly intertwined. Esmee Sinead Hanna and Brendan Gough examine men's experiences of fertility and lifestyle practices, exploring personal experiences of the role of lifestyle in the quest for conception as well as the broader promotion of 'lifestyle' within both clinical and online material as a key aspect for 'improving' male fertility. Through the exploration of male fertility and lifestyle factors and their modification we examine the growth of healthism around infertility, the role of neoliberalism within this and how this intersects with masculinity. Using a new notion of liquid masculinity, we explore the fluid nature of societal and personal perspectives on the male infertility experience. In doing so we offer new insights into the now accepted idea that 'sperm' is malleable and that fertility controllable through personal choices, despite their being limited scientific evidence for such claims.

"[S]heds light not only on the obstacles to making motherhood safer, but to improving the health of poor populations in general."-Social Anthropology Since 1987, when the global community first recognized the high frequency of women in developing countries dying from pregnancy-related causes, little progress has been made to combat this problem. This study follows the global policies that have been implemented in Solola, Guatemala in order to decrease high rates of maternal mortality among indigenous Mayan women. The author examines the diverse meanings and understandings of motherhood, pregnancy, birth and birth-related death among the biomedical personnel, village women, their families, and midwives. These incongruous perspectives, in conjunction with the implementation of such policies, threaten to disenfranchise clients from their own cultural understandings of self. The author investigates how these policies need to meld with the everyday lives of these women, and how the failure to do so will lead to a failure to decrease maternal deaths globally. From the Introduction: An unspoken effect of reducing maternal mortality to a medical problem is that life and death become the only outcomes by which pregnancy and birth are understood. The specter of death looms large and limits our full exploration of either our attempts to curb maternal mortality, or the phenomenon itself. Certainly women's survival during childbirth is the ultimate measure of success of our efforts. Yet using pregnancy outcomes and biomedical attendance at birth as the primary feedback on global efforts to make pregnancy safer is misguided.

While much of the world worries about increasing population, this book looks the other way. It highlights the dramatic fall in fertility rates in all regions of the world. Demographers suggest that by 2050 this will lead to population decline. While environmentally this may be welcomed, there may also be negative impacts on our economies: less workers, an increasing number of elderly, and more unwanted childlessness. In this book, key experts untangle the reasons for not having children; international case studies demonstrate that there are similar but also different reasons operating in different areas and psychologists and sociologists explore the possible impact on children, parents and the elderly. Given that fertility trends are not easy to reverse, the book concludes that more needs to be done to maximize the potential of all children; particularly those who have been at the margins of society.

From a comparative perspective, human life histories are unique and raising offspring is unusually costly: humans have relatively short birth intervals compared to other apes, childhood is long, mothers care simultaneously for many dependent children (other apes raise one offspring at a time), infant mortality is high in natural fertility/mortality populations, and human females have a long post-reproductive lifespan. These features conspire to make child raising very burdensome. Mothers frequently defray these costs with paternal help (not usual in other ape species), although this contribution is not always enough. Grandmothers, elder siblings, paid allocarers, or society as a whole, help to defray the costs of childcare, both in our evolutionary past and now. Studying offspring care in a various human societies, and other mammalian species, a wide range of specialists such as anthropologists, psychologists, animal behaviorists, evolutionary ecologists, economists and sociologists, have contributed to this volume, offering new insights into and a better understanding of one of the key areas of human society.

Written by a pediatrician/adolescent medicine specialist and a developmental psychologist, this book is a collection of informative, nonredundant yet comprehensive studies on adolescent pregnancy and parenting. More than 200 adolescent women in an ethnically diverse sample were studied prenatally and at regular 6-month intervals for 31/2 years postpartum. Most of the teens were poor, unmarried, first-time mothers who resided within Southeast San Diego, a poor urban area approximately 10 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border. The purpose of this book was to offer researchers, practitioners, program directors, teachers, and graduate and medical students a better understanding of teenage pregnancy and parenthood within the following domains: * adolescent prenatal care and postpartum maternal and infant health outcomes, * immediate repeat pregnancy, * adolescent mothers' parenting, * the role of the adolescent's mother in teenage mothers' parenting, and * the baby's father.

For almost nine decades, since their mass-resettlement to the Levant in the wake of the Genocide and First World War, the Armenian communities of Lebanon and Syria appear to have successfully maintained a distinct identity as an ethno-culturally diverse group, in spite of representing a small non-Arab and Christian minority within a very different, mostly Arab and Muslim environment. The author shows that, while in Lebanon the state has facilitated the development of an extensive and effective system of Armenian ethno-cultural preservation, in Syria the emergence of centralizing, authoritarian regimes in the 1950s and 1960s has severely damaged the autonomy and cultural diversity of the Armenian community. Since 1970, the coming to power of the Asad family has contributed to a partial recovery of Armenian ethno-cultural diversity, as the community seems to have developed some form of tacit arrangement with the regime. In Lebanon, on the other hand, the Armenian community suffered the consequences of the recurrent breakdown of the consociational arrangement that regulates public life. In both cases the survival of Armenian cultural distinctiveness seems to be connected, rather incidentally, with the continuing 'search for legitimacy' of the state.

In the first three decades of this century Germany was concerned to protect its Volkskorper, the body politic, from the ravages of a social "disease" which affected all western Europe. This "disease" was a decline in the birth rate. The "solution" to this "disease" involved interfering with the Frauenkorper, the female body. German women's sexuality was to be controlled so that the number of healthy children required for a powerful state would be produced. However the politics of reproduction carried a potential conflict between Volkskorper and Frauenkorper, between collective and individual interests. This conflict is central to this study which analyses the tactics which the German state and its agencies used to regulate the size and balance of population to accord with their social, economic and political beliefs rather than with the views and wishes of individuals. During the Weimar Republic individual women and families were the target of intervention in four different areas of policy those of maternity, sexuality, contraception and abortion. In this study birth control is understood to encompass all the popular practices of avoiding unwanted children as well as the two differ