Birth Story

Birth is natural. Birth is dangerous. But who gets to decide what birth means? A landmark new history of women, freedom and power.

Birth is usually treated as a private matter – a natural process or a medical one. But Elizabeth Prochaska argues that it has always been profoundly political. Birth is our original story of belonging: to family, to land, to nation. And because it makes the human future possible, societies have always sought to govern its power.

Prochaska reveals how that power has been managed through two enduring stories: the nature story and the danger story. One presents birth as women’s natural destiny; the other frames women’s bodies as dangerous and unreliable, in need of supervision and control. For millennia, these stories have worked together to take authority away from women. Both remain with us today – in the delivery room, the courts and the reproductive crisis we now face.

Drawing on history, philosophy and literature, as well as her own experience as a mother, human rights lawyer, doula and co-founder of Birthrights, Prochaska restores birth to its place as one of the great subjects of human history. At a moment when abortion rights are being dismantled, maternity systems are failing and more than half the countries in the world have fallen below replacement fertility, this is a radical and illuminating new history – and an invitation to imagine a different story of birth, freedom and our capacity to begin again.