This insightful study of contemporary birthing uses the work of doulas to explore the questions raised near birth: What do we value, and how do we navigate those values when they are tangled in conflict?
Pregnancy, birthing, and infant care offer a microcosm of cultural debates. In this ethnography of childbearing in Northern California, Andrea Ford examines how people's birthing decisions and experiences relate to and construct the American ideal of the individual through the values of progress, experience, autonomy, equality, authenticity, immunity, and redemption.
Both an anthropologist and a doula who has observed and participated in dozens of births, Ford explores how parents, practitioners, activists, laws, technologies, media, and medical institutions shape the politics of care. Near Birth shows that questions about the best way to have a baby concern much more than health procedures. In the answers lie often-unacknowledged claims about what kinds of personhood matter and what ways of living are valued and valuable.
Andrea Ford is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Edinburgh and coeditor of Hormonal Theory: A Rebellious Glossary.
"Pregnancy is a problem for autonomy, and yet, along with birth, it is frequently approached as an opportunity for self-actualization. In this study of doula-assisted birth in the Bay Area, Andrea Ford holds a mirror up to middle-class anxieties to reflect broader cultural tensions. Sensitive and erudite, Near Birth is a revelation."—Heather Anne Paxson, Associate Dean for Faculty, MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
"This book is a fresh take on contemporary childbirth in the context of the California dream, where doulas are both bespoke care providers and activists for birth reform. An ethnographically rich portrait of the people, places, things, and values at play in the contest to shape the meanings and experiences of birth."—Margaret MacDonald, author of At Work in the Field of Birth: Midwifery Narratives of Nature, Tradition, and Home
"Ford offers us the richly informed tale of how a community known as a 'birth utopia' got so taken over by medicine that midwifery became one more medical profession and the work of actually helping women give birth—caring for and informing and truly attending to them; being genuinely near birth as an activity the birther does, not a procedure performed on her body—got turned over to lay people who have no power in that medical system."—Barbara Katz Rothman, author of The Biomedical Empire: Lessons Learned from the COVID-19 Pandemic
"Sometimes a scholar takes a traditional topic and shows us how to look at it in an entirely new light—both because the phenomenon itself has altered and because the analytic lens is fresh and exciting. Ford performs this prismatic magic in Near Birth."—Megan Moodie, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz
272 pp.6 x 9Illus: 1 b/w illustration
9780520412910$29.95|£25.00Paper
Mar 2025