Pushing for Midwives ─ Homebirth Mothers and the Reproductive Rights Movement

"Pushing for Midwives is a fascinating, richly analytical ethnography. Craven shows how class, especially, continues to create profoundly different orientations to reproductive politics, `respectability,' consumerism, consumers' rights, activism, and power. Pushing for Midwives provides a wonderful array of voices to help us consider the challenges of organizing for adequate reproductive health care today."---Rickie Solinger, author of Pregnancy and Power and Beggars and Choosers

"This excellent book accomplishes Craven's dual goals of writing a history of women's reproductive rights activism and describing contemporary `consumer rights' strategies within the politics of the natural childbirth movement, which has failed to appropriately address race and class disparities. A must-read for anyone wanting to understand how to advocate more effectively for all women and the midwives women need to fully achieve their reproductive rights!"---Robbie Davis-Floyd, Ph.D., author of Birth as an American Rite of Passage and co-editor of Mainstreaming Midwives

"Pushing for Midwives shows how the resurgence of home birth is a local story crosscut by broader forces of race, class, and professional power. With impressive command of related scholarship and keen attention to the hazards and possibilities of living---and birthing---as `consumers' under the conditions of neoliberal capitalism, Craven writes with a clarity that will appeal to a wide diversity of readers."---Pamela E. Klassen, University of Toronto, author of Blessed Events and Pathologies of Modernity

"In her beautifully rendered study of midwifery in Virginia, Craven shows how the rhetoric of `consumer choice'---a shibboleth of those promoting reproductive rights for women---excludes large segments of the childbearing population. In the best tradition of anthropology, she unpacks an irony, illustrating how our social and economic environment can simultaneously celebrate and constrain women's choices. Great stuff."---Raymond De Vries, Professor, Bioethics/Sociology/Obstetrics and Gynecology, University of Michigan, and author of A Pleasing Birth