The Politics of Birth

The Politics of Birth PDF Author: Sheila Kitzinger
Publisher: Books for Midwives
ISBN:
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Book Description
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.

Birth Control Politics in the United States, 1916-1945

Birth Control Politics in the United States, 1916-1945 PDF Author: Carole Ruth McCann
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801486128
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
In a disturbing behind-the-scenes history of the early achievements of Margaret Sanger's American birth control movement, Carole R. McCann scrutinizes the movement's compromises as well as its successes.

The Moral Property of Women

The Moral Property of Women PDF Author: Linda Gordon
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252095278
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 466

Book Description
Now in paperback, The Moral Property of Women is a thoroughly updated and revised version of the award-winning historian Linda Gordon’s classic study, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right (1976). It is the only book to cover the entire history of the intense controversies about reproductive rights that have raged in the United States for more than 150 years. Arguing that reproduction control has always been central to women’s status, Gordon shows how opposition to it has long been part of the entrenched opposition to gender equality.

Politics of Abortion and Birth Control in Historical Perspective

Politics of Abortion and Birth Control in Historical Perspective PDF Author: Donald T. Critchlow
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271044859
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Book Description
While there is extensive literature on the social history, politics, and legal aspects of birth control and abortion in the United States, the history of family planning as a policy remains to be fully recorded. This volume is intended to contribute to this history by examining birth control and abortion within a larger cultural, policy, and comparative framework. The essays contained in this volume represent a variety of perspectives and scholarly interests. In many instances the authors differ with each other as well as with the editor on fundamental points of historical interpretation. They all, however, share a commitment to study the politics of population within a scholarly framework that emphasizes the importance of policy history for understanding past and contemporary problems.

Bodies that Birth

Bodies that Birth PDF Author: Rachelle Chadwick
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317302435
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
Bodies that Birth puts birthing bodies at the centre of questions about contemporary birth politics, power, and agency. Arguing that the fleshy and embodied aspects of birth have been largely silenced in social science scholarship, Rachelle Chadwick uses an array of birth stories, from diverse race-class demographics, to explore the narrative entanglements between flesh, power, and sociomateriality in relation to birth. Adopting a unique theoretical framework incorporating new materialism, feminist theory, and a Foucauldian ‘analytics of power’, the book aims to trace and trouble taken-for-granted assumptions about birthing bodies. Through a diffractive and dialogical approach, the analysis highlights the interplay between corporeality, power, and ideologies in the making of birth narratives across a range of intersectional differences. The book shows that there is no singular birthing body apart from sociomaterial relations of power. Instead, birthing bodies are uncertain zones or unpredictable assortments of physiology, flesh, sociomateriality, discourse, and affective flows. At the same time, birthing bodies are located within intra-acting fields of power relations, including biomedicine, racialized patriarchy, socioeconomics, and geopolitics. Bodies that Birth brings the voices of women from different sociomaterial positions into conversation. Ultimately, the book explores how attending to birthing bodies can vitalize global birth politics by listening to what matters to women in relation to birth. This is fascinating reading for researchers, academics, and students from across the social sciences.

The Politics of the Pill

The Politics of the Pill PDF Author: Rachel VanSickle-Ward
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190675373
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
The announcement of a Health and Human Services (HHS) rule requiring insurance providers to cover the costs of contraception as part of the Affordable Care Act sparked widespread political controversy. How did something that millions of American women use regularly become such a fraught political issue? In The Politics of the Pill, Rachel VanSickle-Ward and Kevin Wallsten explore how gender has shaped contemporary debates over contraception policy in the U.S. Within historical context, they examine the impact that women and perceptions of gender roles had on media coverage, public opinion, policy formation, and legal interpretations from the deliberation of the Affordable Care Act in 2009 to the more recent Supreme Court rulings in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Zubic v. Burwell. Their central argument is that representation matters: who had a voice significantly impacted policy attitudes, deliberation and outcomes. While women's participation in the debate over birth control was limited by a lack of gender parity across institutions, women nevertheless shaped policy making on birth control in myriad and interconnected ways. Combining detailed analyses of media coverage and legislative records with data from public opinion surveys, survey experiments, elite interviews, and congressional testimony, The Politics of the Pill tells a broader story of how gender matters in American politics.

The Second Birth

The Second Birth PDF Author: Tilo Schabert
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022618515X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 183

Book Description
Most scholars link the origin of politics to the formation of human societies, but in this innovative work, Tilo Schabert takes it even further back: to our very births. Drawing on mythical, philosophical, religious, and political thought from around the globe—including America, Europe, the Middle East, and China—The Second Birth proposes a transhistorical and transcultural theory of politics rooted in political cosmology. With impressive erudition, Schabert explores the physical fundamentals of political life, unveiling a profound new insight: our bodies actually teach us politics. Schabert traces different figurations of power inherent to our singular existence, things such as numbers, time, thought, and desire, showing how they render our lives political ones—and, thus, how politics exists in us individually, long before it plays a role in the establishment of societies and institutions. Through these figurations of power, Schabert argues, we learn how to institute our own government within the political forces that already surround us—to create our own world within the one into which we have been born. In a stunning vision of human agency, this book ultimately sketches a political cosmos in which we are all builders, in which we can be at once political and free.

Politics of the Womb

Politics of the Womb PDF Author: Lynn Thomas
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520936647
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

Book Description
In more than a metaphorical sense, the womb has proven to be an important site of political struggle in and about Africa. By examining the political significance—and complex ramifications—of reproductive controversies in twentieth-century Kenya, this book explores why and how control of female initiation, abortion, childbirth, and premarital pregnancy have been crucial to the exercise of colonial and postcolonial power. This innovative book enriches the study of gender, reproduction, sexuality, and African history by revealing how reproductive controversies challenged long-standing social hierarchies and contributed to the construction of new ones that continue to influence the fraught politics of abortion, birth control, female genital cutting, and HIV/AIDS in Africa.

The Birth of Politics

The Birth of Politics PDF Author: Melissa Lane
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691173095
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396

Book Description
"First published in the United Kingdom as: Greek and Roman political ideas: a Pelican introduction, by the Penquin Group, Penguin Books ... London"--T.p. verso.

Birth of the State

Birth of the State PDF Author: Charlotte Epstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190917644
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
This book uses the body to peel back the layers of time and taken-for-granted ideas about the two defining political forms of modernity, the state and the subject of rights. It traces, under the lens of the body, how the state and the subject mutually constituted each other all the way down, by going all the way back, to their original crafting in the seventeenth century. It considers two revolutions. The first, scientific, threw humanity out of the centre of the universe, and transformed the very meanings of matter, space, and the body; while the second, legal and political, re-established humans as the centre-point of the framework of modern rights. The book analyses the fundamental rights to security, liberty, and property respectively as the initial knots where the state-subject relation was first sealed. It develops three arguments, that the body served to naturalise security; to individualise liberty; and to privatise property. Covering a wide range of materials--from early modern Dutch painting, to the canon of English political thought, the Anglo-Scottish legal struggles of naturalization, and medical and religious practices--it shows both how the body has operated as history's great naturaliser, and how it can be mobilised instead as a critical tool that lays bare the deeply racialised and gendered constructions that made the state and the subject of rights. The book returns to the origins of constructivist and constitutive theorising to reclaim their radical and critical potential.