ABSTRACT
In advancing new readings on child-bearing in the third world,1 tensions between dealing with bodies that are simultaneously “real” and socially constructed (Longhurst 1997) are constantly negotiated. Closely related are the tensions between the modernist presumptions that continue to underlie fertility analysis (Greenhalgh 1996) and subsequently inform national population policies (Basu 1997), and the dynamics of various approaches found in emancipatory feminist scholarship concerned with reproduction (e.g. Ginsberg and Rapp 1995). Furthermore, tensions surrounding the representation of women, especially of women from the third world, are ever present. Negotiating these interwoven tensions is not easy but there are still too many women dying during childbirth in Papua New Guinea specifically, and the third world more generally, for me to avoid some involvement, albeit from an abstract conceptual position.
