Wombs In Labor

Surrogacy is India's new form of outsourcing, as couples from all over the world hire Indian women to bear their children for a fraction of the cost of surrogacy elsewhere with little to no government oversight or regulation. In the first detailed ethnography of India's surrogacy industry, Amrita Pande visits clinics and hostels and speaks with surrogates and their families, clients, doctors, brokers, and hostel matrons in order to shed light on this burgeoning business and the experiences of the laborers within it. From recruitment to training to delivery, Pande's research focuses on how reproduction meets production in surrogacy and how this reflects characteristics of India's larger labor system. Pande's interviews prove surrogates are more than victims of disciplinary power, and she examines the strategies they deploy to retain control over their bodies and reproductive futures. While some women are coerced into the business by their families, others negotiate with clients and their clinics to gain access to technologies and networks otherwise closed to them. As surrogates, the women Pande meets get to know and make the most of advanced medical discoveries. They traverse borders and straddle relationships that test the boundaries of race, class, religion, and nationality. Those who focus on the inherent inequalities of India's surrogacy industry believe the practice should be either banned or strictly regulated. Pande instead advocates for a better understanding of this complex labor market, envisioning an international model of fair-trade surrogacy founded on openness and transparency in all business, medical, and emotional exchanges.

Through information, her own experience, and client stories, Geneva Montano presents birthing people with the opportunity to create a pregnancy and birth where their babies are heard and trusted, where they are invited to tap into the innate knowing within their wombs and the opportunity to exit the popular birth narrative that is mired in fear, blame, and doubt. Her compassionately connected approach offers comfort in the midst of the challenges that new parents face. It anchors them in the ancient wisdom of spirit and body to address common fears and choices that arise for many birthing families. Wisdom from the Womb delivers empowerment through the art of storytelling and humor, the evidence of science and anecdote, the practices of peaceful stillness and aligned movement, and the ability we all have to listen to and trust ourselves and our babies. Proceeds from this book will be donated to Colorado Community Birth, a non-profit organization that offers volunteer birth services to people who would not otherwise be able to access them and mentorship to people who want to guide birthing people through the process as midwives and doulas. "Geneva's compelling stories will take you on a journey of understanding the importance of MotherBaby love and connection that begins in the womb and that will guide you to claim your power in birth and parenthood. This is a midwife's tale of transformation that will support you in connecting to your baby and your body and will open you to the miracles of birth in new ways. Birth is a day that impacts and sets the foundation for your baby and your relationships. There is no greater investment than in preparing for birth with love and connection. Geneva gives you a treasure of knowledge that will engage and inspire you and your baby to a lifelong relationship of trust and love." -Debra Pascali-Bonaro, author, Orgasmic Birth "In an experience that feels like there are countless decisions to be made, Geneva carves an intuitive path to bringing your baby smoothly and calmly into the world with her beautiful words and wisdom. Her book gently reminds you that, no matter your experience in pregnancy or birth, the answers you seek are within your womb." -Ricki Lake & Abby Epstein, filmmakers, The Business of Being Born Geneva Montano is a Colorado native and mother of four. She has been a birth worker since 2003 and has attended over 650 births in homes, birth centers, and hospitals. Geneva has had a lifelong passion for spirituality, art, and self-exploration. She believes that each birth teaches her and her clients the life lessons they have been seeking. Geneva is a Registered and Certified Professional Midwife, Certified Doula, Registered Yoga teacher, prenatal and postnatal yoga teacher, CPR instructor, body and energy worker, doula trainer, author, artist, and activist. She is certified in womb massage, holistic healing of the pregnant and postpartum bodies, NLP, quantum transformation, and more. She loves teaching, listening to people's stories with her ears, heart, and hands, and being a vessel for transmitting divine healing to bodies and spirits. Midwife. Doula. Spirit Medicine. www.GenevaMontano.com

Surrogacy is IndiaÕs new form of outsourcing, as couples from all over the world hire Indian women to bear their children for a fraction of the cost of surrogacy elsewhere with little to no government oversight or regulation. In the first detailed ethnography of IndiaÕs surrogacy industry, Amrita Pande visits clinics and hostels and speaks with surrogates and their families, clients, doctors, brokers, and hostel matrons in order to shed light on this burgeoning business and the experiences of the laborers within it. From recruitment to training to delivery, PandeÕs research focuses on how reproduction meets production in surrogacy and how this reflects characteristics of IndiaÕs larger labor system. PandeÕs interviews prove surrogates are more than victims of disciplinary power, and she examines the strategies they deploy to retain control over their bodies and reproductive futures. While some women are coerced into the business by their families, others negotiate with clients and their clinics to gain access to technologies and networks otherwise closed to them. As surrogates, the women Pande meets get to know and make the most of advanced medical discoveries. They traverse borders and straddle relationships that test the boundaries of race, class, religion, and nationality. Those who focus on the inherent inequalities of IndiaÕs surrogacy industry believe the practice should be either banned or strictly regulated. Pande instead advocates for a better understanding of this complex labor market, envisioning an international model of fair-trade surrogacy founded on openness and transparency in all business, medical, and emotional exchanges.

Imagine being able to observe with astonishing clarity a child's delicate features as they evolve over the course of a pregnancy, or witness the complex behavior of new human life in utero. Now we can, thanks to the advent of innovative 3D and 4D imaging technologies that provide a powerful diagnostic tool for doctors and cast vivid light on our earliest development--and a profound new way for parents to bond with their babies on a deeper emotional level. Each spread features a central image and information about that particular stage as well as brief commentary explaining what we know and how we know it. For example, at 24 weeks we watch a fetus open and close her eyes, display facial expressions resembling a grimace and a frown, and stick out her tongue (no one has yet established exactly why). And during the last trimester, we learn, she experiences REM sleep and can hear loud noises through the fluids of her mother's body--a first hint of the world that awaits outside the womb.

A quiet revolution has been taking place during the past three decades. The way that children enter families has changed radically among upper middle class families. In the 1980s infertility increasing became defined as a medical problem that could be solved with assisted reproductive technologies (ART) rather than through adoption. Asexual or 'assisted conception' involving medical technologies such as in vitro fertilization and embryo transfers began to replace sexual reproduction for infertile couples. Third parties, referred to as surrogates are hired to assist individuals and/or couples who wish to conceive and child with whom they share a genetic tie. This has resulted in a 'surrogate baby boom.' Outsourcing the Womb provides a critical introduction to the global surrogacy market. A comparative analysis of the assisted reproductive technology and surrogacy industry in Egypt, Israel, India and the United States disentangles the intersecting roles of race, religion, class inequality, religious law, and global capitalism. Gestational surrogacy challenges the idea of 'natural' reproduction and of the meaning of parenthood. What role should the state play in providing individuals and families with access to reproductive technologies? This book concludes with a discussion of 'reproductive justice'. The goal of this new, unique series is to offer readable, teachable "thinking frames" on today's social problems and social issues by leading scholars, all in short 60 page or shorter formats, and available for view on http://routledge.customgateway.com/routledge-social-issues.html For instructors teaching a wide range of courses in the social sciences, the Routledge Social Issues Collection now offers the best of both worlds: originally written short texts that provide "overviews" to important social issues as well as teachable excerpts from larger works previously published by Routledge and other presses.

This book explores figurative images of the womb and the simile of a woman in labor from the Hebrew Bible, problematizing previous interpretations that present these as disparate images and showing how their interconnectivity embodies relationship with YHWH. In the Hebrew Bible, images of the womb and the pregnant body in labor do not co-occur despite being grounded in an image of a whole pregnant female body; the pregnant body is instead fragmented into these two constituent parts, and scholars have continued to interpret these images separately with no discussion of their interconnectivity. In this book, Langton explores the relationship between these images, inviting readers into a wider conversation on how the pregnant body functions as a means to an end, a place to access and seek a relationship with YHWH. Readers are challenged and asked to rethink how these images have been interpreted within feminist scholarship, with womb imagery depicting YHWH’s care for creation or performing the acts of a midwife, and the pregnant body in labor as a depiction of crisis. Langton explores select texts depicting these images, focusing on the corporeal experience and discussing direct references and allusions to the physicality of a pregnant body within these texts. This approach uncovers ancient and current androcentric ideology which dictates that conception, gestation, and birth must be controlled not by the female body, but by YHWH. The Womb and the Simile of the Woman in Labor in the Hebrew Bible is of interest to students and scholars working on the Hebrew Bible, gender in the Bible and the Near East more broadly, and feminist biblical criticism.

Based on nearly two years of ethnographic fieldwork in a Muslim village in northern Sudan, Wombs and Alien Spirits explores the zâr cult, the most widely practiced traditional healing cult in Africa. Adherents of the cult are usually women with marital or fertility problems, who are possessed by spirits very different from their own proscribed roles as mothers. Through the woman, the spirit makes demands upon her husband and family and makes provocative comments on village issues, such as the increasing influence of formal Islam or encroaching Western economic domination. In accommodating the spirits, the women are able metaphorically to reformulate everyday discourse to portray consciousness of their own subordination. Janice Boddy examines the moral universe of the village, discussing female circumcision, personhood, kinship, and bodily integrity, then describes the workings of the cult and the effect of possession on the lives of men as well as women. She suggests that spirit possession is a feminist discourse, though a veiled and allegorical one, on women's objectification and subordination. Additionally, the spirit world acts as a foil for village life in the context of rapid historical change and as such provides a focus for cultural resistance that is particularly, though not exclusively, relevant to women.

Central to this book are Gbigbil women's experiences with different "reproductive interruptions": miscarriages, stillbirths, child deaths, induced abortions, and infertility. Rather than consider these events as inherently dissimilar as women do in Western countries, the Gbigbil women of eastern Cameroon see them all as instances of "wasted wombs" that leave their reproductive trajectories hanging in the balance. The women must navigate this uncertainty while negotiating their social positions, aspirations for the future, and the current workings of their bodies. Providing an intimate look into these processes, Wasted Wombs shows how Gbigbil women constantly shift their interpretations of when a pregnancy starts, what it contains, and what is lost in case of a reproductive interruption, in contrast to Western conceptions of fertility and loss. Depending on the context and on their life aspirations—be it marriage and motherhood, or an educational trajectory and employment, or profitable sexual affairs with so-called "big fish"—women negotiate and manipulate the meanings and effects of reproductive interruptions. Paradoxically, they often do so while portraying themselves as powerless. Wasted Wombs carefully analyzes such tactics in relation to the various social predicaments that emerge around reproductive interruptions, as well as the capricious workings of women's physical bodies.

This book explores how the humoral womb was evoked, enacted, and embodied on the Shakespearean stage by considering the intersection of performance studies and humoral theory. Galenic naturalism applied the four humors—yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, and blood—to delineate women as porous, polluting, and susceptible to their environment. This book draws on early modern medical texts to provocatively demonstrate how Shakespeare’s canon offers a unique agency to female characters via humoral discourse of the womb. Chapters discuss early modern medicine’s attempt to theorize and interpret the womb, specifically its role in disease, excretion, and conception, alongside passages of Shakespeare’s plays to offer a fresh reading of (geo)humoral subjectivity. The book shows how Shakespeare subversively challenges contemporary notions of female fluidity by accentuating the significance of the womb as a source of self-defiance and autonomy for female characters across his canon.