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Birth Wars

Delivering Safe Maternity in a Changing World

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Birth Wars

By: Leah Hazard
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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.

© Leah Hazard 2027 (P) Penguin Audio 2027

Sexual & Reproductive Health
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Critic reviews

Praise for Leah Hazard
It is her capacity to love and give so personally to the many thousands of women she has worked with which imbues this book with its power (Julia Samuel)
Leah Hazard expertly blends science with passion (Rachel Clarke, author of The Story of a Heart )
Leah Hazard is a brilliant storyteller (Katherine May, author of Wintering )
Brings the maternity ward to life in all its gory, humorous and touching glory
Hazard's eye is keen, her range broad, and her tone scrupulously compassionate
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