Providing an understanding of the impact of social circumstance on women giving birth, their babies and families in the 21st century, this title explains to midwives and other health professionals how social issues, such as domestic violence, race and poverty, can affect the birth progress.

Greatly expanded, revised and updated, with an entirely new chapter on disability, The Social Context of Birth, Second Edition provides an essential understanding of how social issues affect midwives, the birth process and motherhood. Childbirth is much more than a biological event or a set of case notes. No-one has an uneventful pregnancy, and women seek narratives through which they can explain and try to make sense of what has happened to them. This is often neglected in the relentlessly technocratic modern culture of childbirth. Appreciating the social context surrounding an individual enriches the understanding a midwife must have if she is to work successfully alongside a woman and her family throughout a pregnancy and birth in an insightful, intelligent and informed manner. This comprehensive guide provides countless valuable insights for midwives, nurses, obstetricians and health visitors into the many different lives, experiences and expectations of women in their childbearing years, their babies and families in the 21st Century. Written by a team of highly experienced health professionals, it also covers contentious areas of maternity care, such as new reproductive technologies and fetal surveillance.

Greatly expanded, revised and updated, with an entirely new chapter on disability, The Social Context of Birth, Second Edition provides an essential understanding of how social issues affect midwives, the birth process and motherhood. Childbirth is much more than a biological event or a set of case notes. No-one has an uneventful pregnancy, and women seek narratives through which they can explain and try to make sense of what has happened to them. This is often neglected in the relentlessly technocratic modern culture of childbirth. Appreciating the social context surrounding an individual enriches the understanding a midwife must have if she is to work successfully alongside a woman and her family throughout a pregnancy and birth in an insightful, intelligent and informed manner. This comprehensive guide provides countless valuable insights for midwives, nurses, obstetricians and health visitors into the many different lives, experiences and expectations of women in their childbearing years, their babies and families in the 21st Century. Written by a team of highly experienced health professionals, it also covers contentious areas of maternity care, such as new reproductive technologies and fetal surveillance.

The Politics of Birth explores ways in which we learn about birth, how we talk and feel about it, assumptions that professional caregivers may make, and the roles and skills of midwives. Topics include home birth and water birth; the use of drugs in childbirth; obstetric and nursing interventions which are often used routinely; Caesarean sections; pressures that care-givers are under, and the choices presented to women that are more apparent than real. Throughout, the author draws on research-based evidence to present both an holistic yet grounded examination of topical issues surrounding pregnancy and childbirth. This is not a "how to" book. The aim of The Politics of Birth is to help the reader develop deeper insight and understanding of how a technocratic birth culture shapes our ideas about birth and obstetric practice.

The delivery of high quality and equitable care for both mothers and newborns is complex and requires efforts across many sectors. The United States spends more on childbirth than any other country in the world, yet outcomes are worse than other high-resource countries, and even worse for Black and Native American women. There are a variety of factors that influence childbirth, including social determinants such as income, educational levels, access to care, financing, transportation, structural racism and geographic variability in birth settings. It is important to reevaluate the United States' approach to maternal and newborn care through the lens of these factors across multiple disciplines. Birth Settings in America: Outcomes, Quality, Access, and Choice reviews and evaluates maternal and newborn care in the United States, the epidemiology of social and clinical risks in pregnancy and childbirth, birth settings research, and access to and choice of birth settings.

Blessed Events explores how women who give birth at home use religion to make sense of their births and in turn draw on their birthing experiences to bring meaning to their lives and families. Pamela Klassen introduces a surprisingly diverse group of women, in their own words, while also setting their birth stories within wider social, political, and economic contexts. In doing so, she emerges with a study that disrupts conventional views of both childbirth and religion by blurring assumed divisions between conservative and feminist women and by taking childbirth seriously as a religious act. Most American women who have a choice give birth in a hospital and request pain medication. Yet enough women choose and advocate unmedicated home birth--and do so for carefully articulated reasons, social resistance among them--to constitute a movement. Klassen investigates why women whose religious affiliations range from Old Order Amish to Reform Judaism to goddess-centered spirituality defy majority opinion, the medical establishment, and sometimes the law to have their babies at home. In considering their interpretations--including their critiques of the dominant medical model of childbirth and their views on labor pain--she examines the kinds of agency afforded to or denied women as they derive religious meanings from childbirth. Throughout, she identifies tensions and affinities between feminist and traditionalist appraisals of the symbolic meaning of birth and the power of women. What does home birth--a woman-centered movement working to return birth to women's control--mean in practice for women's gender and religious identities? Is this supreme valuing of procreation and motherhood constraining, or does it open up new realms of cultural and social power for women? By asking these questions while remaining cognizant of religion's significance, Blessed Events challenges both feminist and traditionalist accounts of childbearing while broadening our understanding of how religion is ''lived'' in contemporary America.