Sustainable Birth in Disruptive Times, 1st ed. 2021
Global Maternal and Child Health Series

Coordinators: Gutschow Kim, Davis-Floyd Robbie, Daviss Betty-Anne

Language: English

68.56 €

In Print (Delivery period: 15 days).

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Sustainable Birth in Disruptive Times
Publication date:
317 p. · 15.5x23.5 cm · Paperback

95.99 €

In Print (Delivery period: 15 days).

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Sustainable Birth in Disruptive Times
Publication date:
317 p. · 15.5x23.5 cm · Hardback

This contributed volume explores flexible, adaptable, and sustainable solutions to the shockingly high costs of birth across the globe. It presents innovative and collaborative maternity care practices and policies that are intersectional, human rights-based, transdisciplinary, science-driven, and community-based.  Each chapter describes participatory and midwifery-oriented care that helps improve maternal and newborn outcomes within minoritized populations. The featured case studies respond to resource constraints and inequities of access by transforming relations between providers and families or by creating more egalitarian relations among diverse providers such as midwives, obstetricians, and nurses that minimize inefficient hierarchies within maternity care. The authors build on a growing awareness that quality and respectful midwifery care has lower costs and improved outcomes for child bearers, newborns, and providers. Topics include:

 

  • Sustainable collaborations including transfers of care among midwives and obstetricians in India, The Netherlands, Germany, United Kingdom, and Denmark
  • Midwifery-oriented, femifocal, indigenous, and inclusive models of care that counter obstetric violence and gender stereotypes in Mexico, Chile, Guatemala, Argentina, and India
  • Doula care and midwifery care for women of color, previously incarcerated women, indigenous women, and other minoritized groups in the global north and south
  • Practices and metrics for improving quality of newborn and maternal care as well as maternal and newborn outcomes in disruptive times and disaster settings

 

Sustainable Birth in Disruptive Times is an essential and timely resource for providers, policy makers, students, and activists with interests in maternity care, midwifery, medical anthropology, maternal health, newborn health, obstetrics, childbirth, medicine, and global health in disruptive times. 

Chapter 1. Introduction: Sustainable Birth in Disruptive Times.-  Chapter 2. Sustainable Midwifery.- Chapter 3. Bringing Back Breech by Reframing the Language of Risk.- Chapter 4. From Home to Hospital: Sustainable Transfers of Care in the United States.- Chapter 5. Structures for Sustainable Collaboration Between Midwives and Obstetricians in the Netherlands: The Obstetrics and Midwifery Manual and Perinatal Care Partnerships.- Chapter 6. Re/Envisioning Birth Work: Community-Based Doula Training for Low-Income and Previously Incarcerated Women in the United States.- Chapter 7. Sustainable Metrics: Using Measurement-Based Quality Improvement to Improve Maternity Practice While Avoiding Frustration and Pitfalls.- Chapter 8. Unsustainable Surrogacy Practices: What We Can Learn from a Comparative Assessment.- Chapter 9. Childbirth in Chile: Winds of Change.- Chapter 10. Humanizing Care at the Maternity Hospital Estela de Carlotto in Buenos Aires: Providers Relearning Their Roles.-Chapter 11. Luna Maya Birth Centers in Mexico: A Network for Femifocal Care.- Chapter 12. Reconstructing Referrals: Overcoming Barriers to Quality Obstetric Care for Maya Women in Guatemala Through Care Navigation.- Chapter 13. A Sustainable Model of Assessing Maternal Health Needs and Improving Quality of Care During and After Pregnancy.- Chapter 14. Sustainable Maternal and Newborn Care in India: A Case Study from Ladakh.- Chapter 15. Giving Birth at Home in Resource-Scarce Regions of India:  An Argument for Making the Women-Centric Approach of the Traditional Dais Sustainable.- Chapter 16. It Takes More than a Village: Building a Network of Safety in Nepal’s Mountain Communities.- Chapter 17. Tranquil Birth: Revising Risk to Sustain Spontaneous Vaginal.- Chapter 18. Sustainable Birth Care in Disaster Zones and During Pandemics: Low-Tech, Skilled Touch.- Ch 19. Sustainable Newborn Care: Helping Babies Breathe and Essential Newborn.- Chapter 20. Conclusion: Sustainable Maternity Care in Disruptive.


Kim Gutschow, is a Lecturer in Anthropology and Religion, and affiliated with Public Health, Asian Studies, and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where she has taught since 2003. She has published over 35 articles on maternity care, maternal death reviews, and counting maternal mortality in India and the United States; as well as on the gender dynamics and discourses of Buddhist monasticism, Tibetan medicine, community-based irrigation, and land use practices in the Indian Himalayas. She is the author of Being a Buddhist Nun: The Struggle for Enlightenment in the Indian Himalaya (Harvard 2004), which won the Sharon Stephens Prize for best ethnography (2005). Her collaborative research projects with Ladakhi teams have received several awards including a Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers (2009) for Birth: From Home to Hospital and Back Home Again; a National Geographic Explorer Award (2019) for Climate Change Adaptation: By the People, For the People, as well as funding from the Harvard Society of Fellows (1997-2000) and the German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). She raised $100,000 to fund appropriate technology, passive solar design, and other projects with and for Zangskari women via the Gaden Relief Zanskar Project between 1991-2015.

Robbie Davis-Floyd, PhD, is Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin, and Fellow of the Society for Applied Anthropology. She is a well-known medical anthropologist, midwifery and doula advocate, and international speaker and researcher in transformational models in maternity care. Robbie is author of over 80 journal articles and 24 encyclopedia entries, and of Birth as an American Rite of Passage (1992, 2003) and Ways of Knowing about Birth: Mothers, Midwives, Medicine, and Birth Activism (2018); coa
Bridges the power dynamics of midwives vs. obstetricians, home vs. hospital settings, and providers vs. childbearers that contribute to an ongoing maternity care crisis in which roughly 300,000 women and 2.5 million newborns die each year Demonstrates that compassionate, cost-effective, and evidence-based maternity care can be implemented when providers and families drawn from or collaborating with minoritized groups shift practices, clinical protocols, and institutional hierarchies Innovates by addressing the central issues of quality, equity, and dignity of maternity care, along with issues of gender and power dynamics that perpetuate current failures of access, provider burnout, and poor outcomes for mothers and newborns in shifting and disruptive times