Near Birth (eBook)

Contested Values and the Work of Doulas

Andrea Lilly Ford (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
272 Seiten
University of California Press (Verlag)
9780520412927 (ISBN)

Infos

This insightful study of contemporary birthing uses the work of doulas to explore the questions raised near birth: What do we value, and how do we navigate those values when they are tangled in conflict?
 
Pregnancy, birthing, and infant care offer a microcosm of cultural debates. In this ethnography of childbearing in Northern California, Andrea Ford examines how people's birthing decisions and experiences relate to and construct the American ideal of the individual through the values of progress, experience, autonomy, equality, authenticity, immunity, and redemption.
 
Both an anthropologist and a doula who has observed and participated in dozens of births, Ford explores how parents, practitioners, activists, laws, technologies, media, and medical institutions shape the politics of care. Near Birth shows that questions about the best way to have a baby concern much more than health procedures. In the answers lie often-unacknowledged claims about what kinds of personhood matter and what ways of living are valued and valuable.

Inhalt

Contents

Acknowledgments 

Introduction: On Becoming an Individual 
1 • Progress: California as Both Utopia and Dystopia 
2 • Experience: Ways of Knowing, Being, and Doing Physiology 
3 • Autonomy: Negotiating Trust and Control in the Birth Room 
4 • Equality: Social Reproduction and Gendered Responsibility 
5 • Authenticity: Technology, Nature, and Time 
6 • Immunity: Ecological Anxieties about Chemicals, Microbes, and Stress 
7 • Redemption: Activism and Imagined Futures 
Conclusion: Fears and Fantasies 

Notes 
Bibliography 
Index 
 

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 11.3.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Familie / Erziehung
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Schwangerschaft / Geburt
• Themenwelt: Medizin / Pharmazie ► Gesundheitsfachberufe ► Hebamme / Entbindungspfleger
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Politische Theorie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Gender Studies
• Schlagworte: anthropology of birth practices • Bay Area • birth equity • birth work in contemporary society • California • Childbearing • Childbirth • doula birth work • during labor • Emotional • ethnography of doulas • feminist • Patient Empowerment • Physical • postpartum • reproductive justice
• ISBN-13: 9780520412927 / 9780520412927