This book series includes single-authored, co-authored, and edited volumes based on qualitative (or a combination of qualitative and quantitative) research focused on childbirth-related issues, including those related to birth practitioners such as midwives (both professional and traditional), obstetricians, nurses, doulas, and others. It seeks new perspectives on functional and sustainable birth models and the challenges to their creation, as well as on obstetric violence, disrespect, and abuse, and their root causes. Single-case or comparative ethnographies on birth and other reproductive issues, from high-tech conceptions to normal pregnancy and birth, and including reproductive politics, are also welcome.
By Diane M. Tober
October 01, 2024
What happens when people are reduced to products? By pulling back the clinical curtain on the multi-billion dollar per year global egg industry, that is the central question Eggonomics seeks to address. Tracing the emotional and physical journeys egg donors embark upon as suppliers of valuable ...
By Pamela Pasian
May 27, 2024
This book documents the emergence of doulas as care professionals in Italy, considers their training, practices, and representation, and analyses their role in national and international context. Doulas offer emotional, informational and practical support to women and their families during ...
By Anna Temkina, Anastasia Novkunskaya, Daria Litvina
May 27, 2024
This book provides a theoretically and empirically grounded examination of the struggle for maternity care in contemporary Russia, framed by changes to the healthcare system and the roles of its participants after socialism. The chapters consider multiple perspectives and interactions between women...
By Fouzieyha Towghi
March 29, 2024
This book is the first major ethnography of Baloch midwives in Pakistan. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in Balochistan province, it shows how dhīnabogs/dheenabogs (Baloch midwives ranging in age from about 30 to 80) and their dhīnabogirī (midwifery) aid women and their kin through labor...
By Caroline Chautems
May 31, 2023
Based on an ethnography of postpartum consultations by independent midwives in Switzerland, this book produces unique insights into home-birth parents’ breastfeeding journey from the first hours after birth to weaning. Considered the "natural" continuity of childbirth without intervention, ...
By Hanna Laako, Georgina Sánchez-Ramírez
January 09, 2023
This book presents the contemporary history and dynamics of Mexican midwifery - professional, (post)modern or autonomous, traditional and Indigenous - as profoundly political and embedded in differing societal stratifications. By situated politics, the authors refer to various networks, spaces and...
By Robbie Davis-Floyd
May 06, 2022
This classic book, first published in 1992 and again in 2003, has inspired three generations of childbearing people, birth activists and researchers, and birth practitioners—midwives, doulas, nurses, and obstetricians—to take a fresh look at the "standard procedures" that are routinely used to "...
Edited
By Robbie Davis-Floyd
March 31, 2021
This ground-breaking book challenges us to re-think ourselves as techno-sapiens—a new species we are creating as we continually co-evolve ourselves with our technologies. While some of its chapters are imaginary, they are all empirically grounded in ethnography and richly theorized from diverse ...
Edited
By Betty-Anne Daviss, Robbie Davis-Floyd
December 30, 2020
This book addresses the politics of global health and social justice issues around birth, focusing on dynamic communities that have chosen to speak truth to power by reforming dysfunctional health care systems or creating new ones outside the box. The chapters present models of childbirth at ...