Facing the polar forces of an epidemic of cesarean sections and epidurals and home-like labor rooms, American birth is in transition. Caught between the most extreme medicalization -- best seen in a cesarean section rate of nearly 30 percent -- and a rhetoric of women's "choices" and "the natural," women and their midwives, doulas, obstetricians, and nurses labor on. "Laboring On" offers the voices of all of these practitioners, all women trying to help women, as they struggle with this increasingly split vision of birth.
Updating Barbara Katz Rothman's now-classic" In Labor," the first feminist sociological analysis of birth in the United States, "Laboring On" gives a comprehensive picture of the ever-changing American birth practices and often conflicting visions of birth practitioners. The authors deftly weave compelling accounts of birth work, by midwives, doulas, obstetricians, and nurses, into the larger sociohistorical context of health care practices and activism and offer provocative arguments about the current state of affairs and the future of birth in America.

Facing the polar forces of an epidemic of cesarean sections and epidurals and home-like labor rooms, American birth is in transition. Caught between the most extreme medicalization -- best seen in a cesarean section rate of nearly 30 percent -- and a rhetoric of women's "choices" and "the natural," women and their midwives, doulas, obstetricians, and nurses labor on. "Laboring On" offers the voices of all of these practitioners, all women trying to help women, as they struggle with this increasingly split vision of birth.
Updating Barbara Katz Rothman's now-classic" In Labor," the first feminist sociological analysis of birth in the United States, "Laboring On" gives a comprehensive picture of the ever-changing American birth practices and often conflicting visions of birth practitioners. The authors deftly weave compelling accounts of birth work, by midwives, doulas, obstetricians, and nurses, into the larger sociohistorical context of health care practices and activism and offer provocative arguments about the current state of affairs and the future of birth in America.

In Hospital Land USA, Wendy Simonds analyzes the wide-reaching powers of medicalization: the dynamic processes by which medical authorities, institutions, and ideologies impact our everyday experiences, culture, and social life. Simonds documents her own Hospital Land adventures and draws on a wide range of U.S. cultural representations - from memoirs to medical mail, from hospital signs to disaster movies - in order to urge critical thinking about conventional notions of care, health, embodiment, identity, suffering, and mortality. This book is intended for general readers, medical practitioners, undergraduate and graduate students in courses on medical sociology, medicine, medical ethics, nursing, public health, carework, visual culture, cultural studies, and gerontology.

In Hospital Land USA, Wendy Simonds analyzes the wide-reaching powers of medicalization: the dynamic processes by which medical authorities, institutions, and ideologies impact our everyday experiences, culture, and social life. Simonds documents her own Hospital Land adventures and draws on a wide range of U.S. cultural representations - from memoirs to medical mail, from hospital signs to disaster movies - in order to urge critical thinking about conventional notions of care, health, embodiment, identity, suffering, and mortality. This book is intended for general readers, medical practitioners, undergraduate and graduate students in courses on medical sociology, medicine, medical ethics, nursing, public health, carework, visual culture, cultural studies, and gerontology.