Laboring On: Birth in Transition in the United States (Perspectives on Gender)
by Wendy Simonds, Bari Meltzer Norman, Barbara Katz Rothman
Perspectives on Gender
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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 show more 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. show lessTags
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Wendy Simonds is Professor of Sociology and Director of Graduate Studies in the Gerontology Institute at Georgia State University. She is the author of Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic and Women and Self-Help Culture: Reading between the Lines; co-editor of Sex Matters: The Sexuality and Society Reader, and co-author of show more Laboring On: Birth in Transition in the United States and Centuries of Solace: Expressions of Maternal Grief in Popular Literature. show less
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Barbara Katz Rothman is Professor of Sociology at the City University of New York. She is a recipient of the Jesse Bernard Award of the American Sociological Association, and a distinguished Chair in Health Sciences from the Fulbright Association. Her most recent book is A Bun in the Oven: How the Food and Birth Movements Resist Industrialization show more (2016). show less
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