Blessed Events
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Considering home birth from a wide variety of perspectives--sociological, political, ethical, medical, psychological, and spiritual--Klassen finds that the pain of childbirth and home birth itself often has a profound impact on the women who choose it. Library Journal In this provocative and engagingly written ethnography, Klassen offers an important complement to other social studies on childbirth in America. Publishers Weekly Blessed Events will appeal most to those in the alternative birth movement, but will be of interest to anyone committed to exploring female embodied experience, as well as those interested in relations between religion and spirituality. -- Amy Mullin Journal of the Association for Research in Mothering
Product Description
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.
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First Sentence
IN A CHILD'S blue wading pool decorated with dolphins and fish, Simone Taylor, a small woman with the strong body of a runner and short blonde hair, sat naked in about six inches of warm water, hands on her pregnant belly. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
IN A CHILD'S blue wading pool decorated with dolphins and fish, Simone Taylor, a small woman with the strong body of a runner and short blonde hair, sat naked in about six inches of warm water, hands on her pregnant belly. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Interesting material, but dry presentation.
14 April 2006
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
The premise of this book was interesting and the exploration of the subject thought provoking. However, it was written as a dissertation and that really shows throughout--the pace and format are "academic" and the language is very dry at times (which is interesting considering the passionate and intense subject material!). The author frequently introduces subjects with phrases such as, "now I will explore xyz" or "in the following section I shall attempt to..." This is not the language of an engaging book about birth, but dissertation or research paper speak that impacts the reader's ability to become absorbed by the text.
The book explores religion and homebirth in America through in depth interviews with homebirthing women (many of whom became birth activists/advocates after their birth experiences). The women represent a wide variety of beliefs and experiences--Amish to Pagan--and that is the strong point of the book. The commonalities found among the diversity of the study's population are very interesting and the author's exploration of this is comprehensive.
The book explores religion and homebirth in America through in depth interviews with homebirthing women (many of whom became birth activists/advocates after their birth experiences). The women represent a wide variety of beliefs and experiences--Amish to Pagan--and that is the strong point of the book. The commonalities found among the diversity of the study's population are very interesting and the author's exploration of this is comprehensive.
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