Birth Wars

Giving birth is everyone’s business.

In this book, midwife and bestselling author Leah Hazard takes us from luxurious birthing suites to maximum-security prisons, from border-town clinics to refugee camps, freebirthing communities to wards dominated by algorithms, showing how childbirth provides a startling lens onto the biggest issues of our time. With clarity and curiosity, Hazard explores how inequality, migration, climate change and political currents are shaping this universal yet intimate human experience, revealing the competing forces that are battling to technologize, moralize, commoditize and dominate the birth space in ways that have already transformed our bodies and our world.

In exposing the fragility of modern industrialized maternity care Birth Wars issues a warning and a rallying cry: highlighting the transformative – or destructive – power of this essential act, not only for the person giving birth, but also for the child who bears the lifelong effects of that day, and for society as a whole.