Birth Wars

Delivering Safe Maternity in a Changing World

Giving birth is everyone’s business.

In this book, Leah Hazard takes us from luxurious birthing suites to solitary confinement cells, 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 technology are shaping this universal yet intimate human experience, revealing the competing forces that are battling to technologize, moralise, commoditise 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.