RT Book
T1 Blessed Events: Religion and Home Birth in America
T2 Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology
A1 Klassen, Pamela E. 1967-
LA English
PP Princeton, NJ
PB Princeton University Press
YR 2021
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1761837737
AB Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface Motherhood Issues -- 1. Procreation Stories: An Introduction -- 2. Cultural Contexts of Home Birth -- 3. Risk, Fear, and the Ethics of Home Birth -- 4. Procreating Religion: Spirituality, Religion, and the Transformations of Birth -- 5. A Sense of Place: Meanings of Home -- 6. Natural Women: Bodies and the Work of Birth -- 7. Sliding between Pain and Pleasure: Home Birth and Visionary Pain -- Epilogue: The Miracle of Birth -- Appendix A: Interview Guide -- Appendix B: The Women in the Study -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
AB Blessed Events explores how women who give birth at home use religion to make sense of their births and in turn draw on their birthing experiences to bring meaning to their lives and families. Pamela Klassen introduces a surprisingly diverse group of women, in their own words, while also setting their birth stories within wider social, political, and economic contexts. In doing so, she emerges with a study that disrupts conventional views of both childbirth and religion by blurring assumed divisions between conservative and feminist women and by taking childbirth seriously as a religious act.Most American women who have a choice give birth in a hospital and request pain medication. Yet enough women choose and advocate unmedicated home birth--and do so for carefully articulated reasons, social resistance among them--to constitute a movement. Klassen investigates why women whose religious affiliations range from Old Order Amish to Reform Judaism to goddess-centered spirituality defy majority opinion, the medical establishment, and sometimes the law to have their babies at home. In considering their interpretations--including their critiques of the dominant medical model of childbirth and their views on labor pain--she examines the kinds of agency afforded to or denied women as they derive religious meanings from childbirth. Throughout, she identifies tensions and affinities between feminist and traditionalist appraisals of the symbolic meaning of birth and the power of women.What does home birth--a woman-centered movement working to return birth to women's control--mean in practice for women's gender and religious identities? Is this supreme valuing of procreation and motherhood constraining, or does it open up new realms of cultural and social power for women? By asking these questions while remaining cognizant of religion's significance, Blessed Events challenges both feminist and traditionalist accounts of childbearing while broadening our understanding of how religion is ''lived'' in contemporary America
OP 336
CN 291.1/783
SN 978-1-4008-2851-7
K1 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Women's Studies
K1 Childbirth
K1 Home birth
K1 Midwife
K1 Midwifery
K1 Direct-entry midwife
K1 Mother
K1 Religion
K1 Abortion
K1 Spirituality
K1 Birth attendant
K1 Natural childbirth
K1 Breastfeeding
K1 Obstetrics
K1 Christian Science
K1 Fetus
K1 Uterus
K1 Caregiver
K1 Episiotomy
K1 Religious Identity
K1 Mennonite
K1 Medicalization
K1 Homeopathy
K1 Amniocentesis
K1 Vagina
K1 Alternative Medicine
K1 Birth Control
K1 University of California Press
K1 Technology
K1 Pregnancy
K1 Nursing
K1 Albanese, Catherine
K1 Auletta, Valerie
K1 Bachelard, Gaston
K1 Barry, Kathleen
K1 Bell, Catherine
K1 Birth Gazette
K1 Braidotti, Rosi
K1 Bynum, Caroline Walker
K1 Christ, Carol
K1 Copeland, Kenneth
K1 Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway)
K1 Day, Dorothy
K1 Dickinson, Emily
K1 Donato, Suzanne
K1 Edwards, Elizabeth
K1 Flaherty, Sara
K1 Foucault, Michel
K1 Gallagher, Janet
K1 Griffith, Marie
K1 Hechtel, Eva
K1 Home Birth (Kitzinger)
K1 Hostetler, Tina
K1 Immaculate Deception (Arms)
K1 Islam
K1 Jay, Nancy
K1 Jewish maternity hospitals
K1 Jones, Linda Carson
K1 Katz, Joanna
K1 Kaufert, Patricia
K1 Kleinman, Arthur
DO 10.1515/9781400828517