Going Into Labour: Childbirth In Capitalism

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

Going into Labour is a Marxist analysis of the labour of childbirth and birth care. Former midwife Anna Fielder interrogates key features of contemporary childbearing, situating birth as a crucial site of struggle against capitalism.

Fielder emphasises the pay and working conditions of birth workers such as midwives and nurses. She also signals the importance of political struggles in birthing arenas against forces including racism, colonialism, misogyny and cisheteronormativity. As capitalism draws on these forces, shaping contemporary inequities and oppressions, activists work to gestate futures that aspire beyond the constraints of the present.