When I ask Willow, an Afro-Puerto Rican young woman in her 20s, if quarantine has helped reduce the stigma of mental illness, she responds: I think it will…
In the small municipal hospital in the Bolivian highland town of Machacamarca (a pseudonym), the chilly air of the Andes seeps into the building, traveling through the thin…
For Spanish click here. In the early months of 2016, as global media sources incited fear among pregnant women that Zika would result in babies with small heads…
For English click here La vida social de las métricas Guatemala es uno de los países de Centroamérica que ha reportado en la última década uno de los…
Cultural anthropologist, Robbie Davis-Floyd, is considered by many as the Queen of Childbirth Studies. A Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of…
Drawings from my research on childbirth in California created an opportunity for sharing reflections on fieldwork and “seeing.” Birth is a highly mediated experience, with ubiquitous images of…
Routine collection of blood samples from neonates – often using so-called Guthrie cards (pictured) – began in the 1960s when a number of North American and European countries…
What does making a new life look like from the perspective of a mobile phone? For the phone of a woman using the public health care system in…
Chekero met Pauline at a local pharmacy in Giyani, a small town in the north-east of the Limpopo Province of South Africa. The area is best known to…
After having recently received a venomous bite by a brown recluse spider in NYC, I’ve spent some time researching my arachnid attacker and discovering how to recover from the…
During the midwife-hosted antenatal class Cath attended in a private hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, where she would eventually give birth, pregnant women were encouraged to name…
Many thanks to the 1,152 people who entered our publisher’s Amazon Giveaway to receive free copies of A World of Babies, and to Cambridge University Press for sponsoring…
Win a free copy of “A World of Babies”! To celebrate the official publication of the book, which is January 2017, our publisher is sponsoring an Amazon Giveaway.…
Nomsa, her sixteen month old son Nathi and I met early one morning at the entrance to the open cast mine in Mafuyana, Southern Matabeleland, Zimbabwe. Nathi safely…
I met Libby on a cold winter morning at the clinic. She was a short woman with a strong voice and slow walk. Libby was 35 years old…
“I was willing to die,” Terri told me, “I just didn’t want to have another caesarian.” She referred to her vaginal birth after three c-sections (a VBA3C), which…
Nine years ago when I started my doctoral studies not only was I in a fertile intellectual endeavour undertaking fieldwork, reading theory, stretching my brain and writing,…
Choice and the assigning of value in the practices and crafting of life-giving work In healthy birthing initiatives described by, among others, the World Health Organization, emphasis has…
(On behalf of the First Thousand Days Research Group (University of Cape Town)) “Good nutrition in the first 1000 days between a woman’s pregnancy and her child’s second…
For this installment of the Top of the Heap series, I spoke with Elly Teman, a medical anthropologist specializing in the anthropology of reproduction and a senior lecturer…
New research claims that saying “Ow” really can ease the pain. Why am I skeptical? Or, rather, why am I skeptical that this works globally? For one thing,…