Explores the politics of childbirth from a Marxist perspective.
Childbirth is often described as a natural process, and yet the choices we make around birth, the risks we face and the care available to us, are tightly bound up in the dynamics of the capitalist system in which we live. Capitalist relations shape childbirth in unacknowledged ways but with intensely inequitable, often traumatic, effects.
Going into Labour is a Marxist analysis of the labour of childbirth and birth care. Former midwife Anna Fielder interrogates key features of contemporary childbearing, situating birth as a crucial site of struggle against capitalism.
Fielder emphasises the pay and working conditions of birth workers such as midwives and nurses. She also signals the importance of political struggles in birthing arenas against forces including racism, colonialism, misogyny and cisheteronormativity. As capitalism draws on these forces, shaping contemporary inequities and oppressions, activists work to gestate futures that aspire beyond the constraints of the present.

lgrsnf/Going_Into_Labour_By_Anna Fielder_Pluto_Press.epub

Osberton Productions Ltd

United Kingdom and Ireland, United Kingdom

Explores the politics of childbirth from a Marxist perspective. Anna Fielder is a sociologist in the Midwifery Department, Auckland University of Technology.

Acknowledgements
1. Conceiving Childbirth
2. Stretch Marx
3. Technological Fetish in the Birth Chamber
4. Subsumed by Risk
5. The Gold Standard of Evidence
6. Freedom of Choice?
7. From the 'Womb' of the Present...

2025-01-26