Reproductive Health and Maternal Sacrifice
Reproductive Health and Maternal Sacrifice

Author: Pam Lowe

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-06-29

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 1137472936

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book demonstrates that the symbol of maternal sacrifice is the notion that 'proper' women put the welfare of children, whether born, in utero or not conceived, over and above any choices and desires of their own. The idea of maternal sacrifice acts as powerful signifier in judging women's behaviour that goes beyond necessary care for any children. The book traces its presence in various aspects of reproductive health, from contraception to breastfeeding. Pam Lowe shows how although nominally choices are presented to women around reproductive health, maternal sacrifice is used to discipline women into conforming to specific norms, reasserting traditional forms of womanhood. This has significant implications for women's autonomy. Women can resist or reject this disciplinary position when making reproductive decisions, but in doing so, they may be positioned as transgressing and/or need to justify their decisions. The book will be of great interest to scholars of sociology, gender studies and health studies.

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

Author: Adrienne Rich

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2021-04-27

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 039386734X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The pathbreaking investigation into motherhood and womanhood from an influential and enduring feminist voice, now for a new generation. In Of Woman Born, originally published in 1976, influential poet and feminist Adrienne Rich examines the patriarchic systems and political institutions that define motherhood. Exploring her own experience—as a woman, a poet, a feminist, and a mother—she finds the act of mothering to be both determined by and distinct from the institution of motherhood as it is imposed on all women everywhere. A “powerful blend of research, theory, and self-reflection” (Sandra M. Gilbert, Paris Review), Of Woman Born revolutionized how women thought about motherhood and their own liberation. With a stirring new foreword from National Book Critics Circle Award–winning writer Eula Biss, the book resounds with as much wisdom and insight today as when it was first written.

Pregnancy Without Birth
Pregnancy Without Birth

Author: Victoria Browne

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-09-08

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1350279706

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Pregnancy is so thoroughly entangled with birth and babies in the popular imagination that a pregnancy which ends in miscarriage consistently appears as a failure or a waste of time – indeed, as not proper to pregnancy at all. But in this compelling book, Victoria Browne argues that reflection on miscarriage actually deepens and expands our understanding of pregnancy, forcing us to consider what pregnancy can amount to besides the production of a child. By exploring common themes within personal accounts of miscarriage-including feelings of failure, self-blame and being 'stuck in limbo'-Pregnancy Without Birth critically interrogates teleological discourses and disciplinary ideologies that elevate birth as pregnancy's 'natural' and 'normal' endpoint. As well as politicizing miscarriage as a feminist issue, the book articulates an alternative intercorporeal philosophy of pregnancy which embraces variation, invites us to sit with ambiguity, contingency and suspension, and enables us to see subjective agency in all pregnancies, even as they are shaped by biological, political and social forces beyond our personal control. What emerges is a relational feminist politics of full-spectrum solidarity, social justice and care (rather than individualized choice and responsibility), which breaks down presumed oppositions between pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion, stillbirth and live birth, and liberates pregnancy from reproductive futurism.

Technologies of Reproduction Across the Lifecourse
Technologies of Reproduction Across the Lifecourse

Author: Victoria Boydell

Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing

Published: 2022-09-15

Total Pages: 439

ISBN-13: 1800717350

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book presents a dialogue between scholars on different aspects of reproductive technologies. If we continue to work in disciplinary silos, reproductive studies is in danger of missing, and thereby reproducing, the kinds of power structures that shape reproductive life.

Voluntary and Involuntary Childlessness
Voluntary and Involuntary Childlessness

Author: Natalie Sappleton

Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing

Published: 2018-08-23

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 1787543617

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

While interest in the drivers, consequences, nature and manifestations of voluntary and involuntary childlessness increases, knowledge progress is hampered by poor linkages across disjointed research fields. The book brings together theoretical insights and empirical investigations into the phenomenon, united within a feminist conceptual framework.

Childbirth, Vulnerability and Law
Childbirth, Vulnerability and Law

Author: Camilla Pickles

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-08-23

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0429812906

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book is inspired by a statement released by the World Health Organization directed at preventing and eliminating disrespectful and abusive treatment during facility-based childbirth. Exploring the nature of vulnerability during childbirth, and the factors which make childbirth a site for violence and control, the book looks at the role of law in the regulation of professional intervention in childbirth. The WHO statement and other published work on ‘mistreatment’, ‘obstetric violence’, ‘birth trauma’, ‘birth rape’, and ‘dehumanised care’ all point to the presence of vulnerability, violence, and control in childbirth. This collected edition explores these issues in the experience of those giving birth, and for those providing obstetric services. It further offers insights regarding legal avenues of redress in the context of this emerging area of concern. Using violence, vulnerability, and control as a lens through which to consider multiple facets of the law, the book brings together innovative research from an interdisciplinary selection of authors. The book will appeal to scholars of law and legal academics, specifically in relation to tort, criminal law, medical law, and human rights. It will also be of interest to postgraduate scholars of medical ethics and those concerned with gender studies more broadly.

We Live for the We
We Live for the We

Author: Dani McClain

Publisher: Bold Type Books

Published: 2019-04-02

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 1568588550

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A warm, wise, and urgent guide to parenting in uncertain times, from a longtime reporter on race, reproductive health, and politics In We Live for the We, first-time mother Dani McClain sets out to understand how to raise her daughter in what she, as a black woman, knows to be an unjust -- even hostile -- society. Black women are more likely to die during pregnancy or birth than any other race; black mothers must stand before television cameras telling the world that their slain children were human beings. What, then, is the best way to keep fear at bay and raise a child so she lives with dignity and joy? McClain spoke with mothers on the frontlines of movements for social, political, and cultural change who are grappling with the same questions. Following a child's development from infancy to the teenage years, We Live for the We touches on everything from the importance of creativity to building a mutually supportive community to navigating one's relationship with power and authority. It is an essential handbook to help us imagine the society we build for the next generation.

Abortion and Ireland
Abortion and Ireland

Author: David Ralph

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-10-21

Total Pages: 137

ISBN-13: 3030586928

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book asks the crucial question of how it came to pass that on the 25 May 2018, the Irish electorate voted by a landslide in favour of changing its abortion legislation that, for the previous thirty-five years, had been one of the most restrictive regimes in Europe. The author shows how, alongside traditional campaigning tactics such as street demonstrations, door-to-door canvassing, and the distribution of pro-choice merchandise and information leaflets, a key strategy of pro-choice advocacy groups was to encourage first-person abortion story-sharing by women in their efforts to repeal the Eighth Amendment, which had effectively banned abortion provision in the country. The book argues that a normalizing of abortion talk took place in the lead-up to the referendum, with women speaking publicly in unprecedented numbers about their abortion histories. These women storytellers were mirroring certain pro-choice movements in other contexts, where a new ‘sound it loud, say it proud’ narrative around abortion experiences has emerged as a central contemporary strategy for destigmatizing abortion discourse. Students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including law, gender studies, sociology, and human geography, will find this book of interest.

An Artistic Autoethnography on the Public Fetus
An Artistic Autoethnography on the Public Fetus

Author: Anna Gonzalez Suero

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-11-11

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 1040194419

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An Artistic Autoethnography on the Public Fetus explores artistic work with the iconic image of the fetus and the personal consequences of the image by analyzing the so-called public fetus within a feminist approach. This book develops a deeply interdisciplinary body of research, engaging with feminist debates on reproductive technology and imagery, art theory, visual histories of anatomical imagery, cultural critiques of the myth of the artistic genius, Gestalt understandings of perception and memory, and anthropological theories of liminality. Through blurring the artistic with the scientific, it explores the potential of autoethnography to serve as a form of conscious raising through which to create new images and stories that counter the public fetus in support of reproductive autonomy and social justice. This book will be useful to feminist scholars who work with issues related to gender, reproduction, sexuality, and autoethnography. At the same time, the book will be of value to undergraduate and graduate students in gender studies as an example of how an autoethnographic process can make unrecognized experiences of gender known to a person.