Going Into Labour: Childbirth in Capitalism

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

Going into Labour fills a void in the literature around both childbirth and reproductive rights, presenting a Marxist analysis of the labor of childbirth. Through each chapter, former midwife Anna Fielder interrogates and unpacks some of the critical features of contemporary childbirth and ultimately situates birth as a key site of the anti-capitalist struggle.

Fielder delves into the ’natural’ birth movement, the increasing engagement of women of color, working-class women, transgender and non-binary gendered people in the politics of birth, the pay and working conditions of caregivers such as midwives and nurses, and the sharp contrast between proliferating rates of cesarean section in the West, and a lack of access to the same (at times lifesaving) form of surgery elsewhere.

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.