Going Into Labour: Childbirth in Capitalism

’This insightful, thoughtful work needs to be read by all of us ... Fielder brings together the two concepts of labour - work and giving birth - and shows us how both are subsumed under capitalism’ Barbara Katz Rothman, author of In Labor

’Entirely original and a fascinating read’ Robbie Davis-Floyd, cultural, medical and reproductive anthropologist

’Fielder’s nuanced analysis demonstrates the contradictory features of obstetrics in capitalist society. A pivotal addition to Marxist understandings of pregnancy and childbirth’ Kirstin Munro, Assistant Professor, The New School for Social Research

Childbirth is often described as a natural process, and yet the choices we make around birth, the risks we face, and the care available to us, are tightly bound up in the dynamics of the capitalist system in which we live. Capitalist relations shape childbirth in largely unacknowledged ways but with intensely inequitable, often traumatic, effects.

Going into Labour is a Marxist analysis of the labor of childbirth and of birth care. Through the chapters, former midwife Anna Fielder interrogates key features of contemporary childbearing, situating birth as a crucial site of struggle against capitalism.

Fielder writes about productivity drives, insurance companies, risk formulations and calls for scientific evidence. She emphasizes the pay of birth workers, such as midwives and nurses, and their working conditions. She also signals the importance of political struggles in birthing arenas against forces including racism, colonialism, misogyny, and cisheteronormativity. As capitalism draws on these forces, shaping contemporary inequities and oppressions, activists work to gestate futures that aspire beyond the present constraints.

Anna Fielder is a sociologist in the Midwifery Department, Auckland University of Technology (AUT).

Anna Fielder is currently a tutor at Massey University, and works as a researcher in the Centre for Midwifery and Women’s Health Research at AUT (Auckland University of Technology). She has written and co-authored various publications which relate to pregnancy, birth, childhood or Marxism. She was employed as a midwife in the UK from 2003 to 2008.