Pushing for Midwives: Homebirth Mothers and the Reproductive Rights Movement By Christa Craven Temple University Press. 2010. 208 pages. $27.95 paperback

Abstract

Christa Craven's Pushing for Midwives: Homebirth Mothers and the Reproductive Rights Movement will appeal to readers interested in issues of reproduction, social movements, policy or health broadly, as well as how race, socioeconomic status and geography affect these issues. Craven's engaging study of midwifery advocacy in Virginia provides two major contributions to the extant literature. First, she examines how global economic trends affect the contours of local activism; and, second, she explores how diversity, or lack thereof, shapes movement recruitment, participation and tactics. Craven frames her book as an analysis of how the mainstream reproductive rights movement's rhetoric of “choice” encourages a consumerist stance that dovetails with increasingly dominant neoliberal logic of the free market. This logic manifests through the mainstream movement's advocacy efforts that rest on the assumption that women are similarly constrained, which, as Craven outlines, there are multiple ways they are decidedly not. The book's structure models the author's self-identified feminist anthropological approach. Before the main text begins, the author explicitly explores her personal and political investments in this research. This section begins a useful discussion of methodology and social position, with which many (feminist) social scientists grapple in their own research. Chapters 1, 2 and 3 provide a detailed history of the class-based shift in birthing practices and how medical authorities demonized home birthing, an arena in which African-American midwives had traditionally held authority in the South. Craven's coverage of the vast scholarship in this area will be particularly helpful for readers unfamiliar with the more common discussions around women's health (e.g., increased medicalization of women's bodies). Chapters 4, 5 and 6 focus on contemporary efforts to pass legislation that decriminalizes homebirth and reduce the byzantine pathway to becoming a legal midwife in the state.