Overview

Across the world, the conditions of childbirth are changing but not all in the same direction. Women in Western countries press for more home deliveries, and to confront some of the effects of the over-medicalisation of motherhood. Most developing countries, by contrast, promote deliveries in clinics and hospitals, and stigmatize women who deliver at home. Mobile phones and social media are pressed into service to identify high-risk mothers and to offer them pregnancy and delivery advice. All of the South Asian countries have been accused of neglecting childbirth and women's healthcare. The Millennium Development Goals (2000-2015) prompted important new Government schemes across South Asia, designed to address the issues of safe motherhood and childbirth. The Sustainable Development Goals (2015-2030) now mandate further efforts to reduce maternal and neo-natal mortality. This book illustrates the continuing paradoxes as well as the new challenges linked to childbirth in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. It brings together anthropologists, historians, and sociologists who reflect on the implications of these new schemes for women's own experiences.

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9780190130718

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Childbirth in South Asia: Old Challenges, New Paradoxes is a sweeping overview of recent critical research on the transformations in the experience, management, and policymaking processes of maternal health in South Asia. This volume is the first of its kind to bring together interdisciplinary work on childbirth by anthropologists, sociologists, historians and public health experts working across the region. Exploring reproductive care from the vantage point of mothers (or mothers-to-be) and families, a wide range of medical practitioners, and policymakers, the accessible chapters in this book elucidate enduring and novel challenges to providing humane high quality reproductive care in this rapidly changing and diverse part of the world in the early 21st century. Cecilia C. Van Hollen, Professor of Anthropology, Yale-NUS College Author of Birth in the Age of AIDS: Women Reproduction and HIV/AIDS in India and Birth on the Threshold: Childbirth and Modernity in South India

Childbirth in South Asia: Old Challenges, New Paradoxes is a sweeping overview of recent critical research on the transformations in the experience, management, and policymaking processes of maternal health in South Asia. This volume is the first of its kind to bring together interdisciplinary work on childbirth by anthropologists, sociologists, historians and public health experts working across the region. Exploring reproductive care from the vantage point of mothers (or mothers-to-be) and families, a wide range of medical practitioners, and policymakers, the accessible chapters in this book elucidate enduring and novel challenges to providing humane high quality reproductive care in this rapidly changing and diverse part of the world in the early 21st century. Cecilia C. Van Hollen, Professor of Anthropology, Yale-NUS College Author of Birth in the Age of AIDS: Women Reproduction and HIV/AIDS in India and Birth on the Threshold: Childbirth and Modernity in South India

Author Information

Roger Jeffery is Professor, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh. Clémence Jullien is CNRS research fellow, Center for South Asian Studies (CEIAS), Paris.

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