Sustainable Birth in Disruptive Times

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxx

   PDF

2. Introduction: Sustainable Birth in Disruptive Times

   • Kim Gutschow, Robbie Davis-Floyd

   Pages 1-26

3. Sustainable Maternity Solutions in High-Income Countries

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 27-27

      PDF

   2. Sustainable Midwifery

      • Elizabeth Davis

      Pages 29-42

   3. Bringing Back Breech by Reframing the Language of Risk

      • Betty-Anne Daviss, Anita Hedditch, Vijaya Krishnan, Helen Dresner Barnes

      Pages 43-60

   4. From Home to Hospital: Sustainable Transfers of Care in the United States

      • Bria Dunham, Sara Hall

      Pages 61-72

   5. Structures for Sustainable Collaboration Between Midwives and Obstetricians in the Netherlands: The Obstetric and Midwifery Manual and Perinatal Care Partnerships

      • Rachael Kulick Bommarito

      Pages 73-84

   6. Re/Envisioning Birth Work: Community-Based Doula Training for Low-Income and Previously Incarcerated Women in the United States

      • Rebecca L. Bakal, Monica R. McLemore

      Pages 85-98

   7. Sustainable Metrics: Using Measurement-Based Quality Improvement to Improve Maternity Practice While Avoiding Frustration and Pitfalls

      • Kathleen H. Pine, Christine H. Morton

      Pages 99-114

   8. Unsustainable Surrogacy Practices: What We Can Learn from a Comparative Assessment

      • Elly Teman, Zsuzsa Berend

      Pages 115-127

4. Sustainable Maternity Solutions in Latin America

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 129-129

      PDF

   2. Childbirth in Chile: Winds of Change

      • Michelle Sadler, Gonzalo Leiva, Ricardo Gómez

      Pages 131-144

   3. Humanizing Care at the Maternity Hospital Estela de Carlotto in Buenos Aires: Providers Relearning Their Roles

      • Celeste Jerez

      Pages 145-156

   4. Luna Maya Birth Centers in Mexico: A Network for Femifocal Care

      • Cristina Alonso, J. M. López, Alison Lucas-Danch, Janell Tryon

      Pages 157-169

   5. Reconstructing Referrals: Overcoming Barriers to Quality Obstetric Care for Maya Women in Guatemala Through Care Navigation

      • Kirsten Austad, Anita Chary, Jessica Hawkins, Boris Martinez, Peter Rohloff

      Pages 171-184

5. Sustainable Maternity Solutions in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 185-185

      PDF

   2. A Sustainable Model of Assessing Maternal Health Needs and Improving Quality of Care During and After Pregnancy

      • Mary McCauley, Nynke van den Broek

      Pages 187-196

   3. Sustainable Maternal and Newborn Care in India: A Case Study from Ladakh

      • Kim Gutschow, Padma Dolma, Spalchen Gonbo

      Pages 197-216

   4. Giving Birth at Home in Resource-Scarce Regions of India: An Argument for Making the Women-Centric Approach of the Traditional Dais Sustainable

      • Bijoya Roy, Imrana Qadeer, Mira Sadgopal, Janet Chawla, Sandhya Gautam

      Pages 217-232

   5. It Takes More Than a Village: Building a Network of Safety in Nepal’s Mountain Communities

      • Vincanne Adams, Sienna R. Craig, Arlene Samen, Surya Bhatta

      Pages 233-248

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. 

• sustainability and birth models
• maternal and neonatal health
• saving newborn lives
• reproductive justice
• ending preventable maternal mortality
• obstetric violence
• midwifery and obstetric models of care
• evidence-based activism in maternity care
• continuum of care
• quality, equity, and dignnity of maternity care
• sustainable models of breech care
• sustainable maternal health metrics
• sustainable surrogacy practices
• physiologic childbirth
• maternity hospital
• medicalized childbirth
• sustainable newborn care
• home birth
• sustainable abortion
• maternal quality of care

• Department of Anthropology and Religion, Williams College, Williamstown, USA

  Kim Gutschow

• Department of Anthropology, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA

  Robbie Davis-Floyd

• Women’s and Gender Studies, The Pauline Jewett Institute, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

  Betty-Anne Daviss

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); coauthor of The Power of Ritual (2016); and lead editor of 13 collections, including the award-winning volumes Childbirth and Authoritative Knowledge (1997) and Cyborg Babies (1998); and the “seminal” Birth Models That Work (2009). Her most recent collection, co-edited with Melissa Cheyney, is Birth in Eight Cultures (2019). Birthing Models on the Human Rights Frontier: Speaking Truth to Power, co-edited with Betty-Anne Daviss, is in press. As a Board Member of the International MotherBaby Childbirth Organization, Robbie served as Lead Editor for the International Childbirth Initiative (ICI): 12 Steps to Safe and Respectful MotherBaby-Family Maternity Care (a joint IMBCO/FIGO global initiative). She presently serves as Lead Editor for a Routledge series called “Social Science Perspectives on Childbirth and Reproduction,” and as Senior Advisor to the Council on Anthropology and Reproduction.


Betty-Anne Daviss, MA, BMJ, RM (Registered Midwife), has served as a midwife for 45 years practicing in various countries on six continents, and as a researcher in the social sciences and clinical epidemiology for over 25 years. She is an Adjunct Professor in Gender and Women’s Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, in Ontario, Canada, and has taught since the 1980s on reproductive issues and the politics of gender and health, while working towards midwifery legislation in North America and abroad. She co-authored the large prospective home birth study of Certified Professional Midwives in North America published in the BMJ (2005) that continues to be accessed 500-800 times a month; the World Report on Postpartum Hemorrhage, when she worked for the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO) (Lalonde et al 2006), which continues to be used with updates; and was the co-principal investigator and principal writer for the Frankfurt study comparing vaginal breeches born with the mothers on their backs vs. in upright positions (Louwen et al. 2017). The only midwife in Canada in the last two decades to have achieved official hospital privileges to attend breech births without a transfer to obstetrics, Betty-Anne has been involved with over 170 planned vaginal breech births, and provided workshops, rounds, and/or plenaries on vaginal breech in Europe, Africa, North and South America, China, India, Australia, and Turkey. She has testified for 10 midwifery hearings/court cases and 11 state and 3 provincial legislative processes. 

Policies and ethics