ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an account of U.S. obstetrics to show how these points come together in a practice that, while financially successful, has poorer health outcomes for women and children. U.S. obstetrics functions according to a metaphysical mechanism and dualism that defines birth as a pathology and the laboring mother as a machine that the obstetrician must control to produce a commodity. Despite being a practice with internal goods, obstetrics undermines free activity by transmogrifying reproductive labor into productive labor aimed at the accumulation of surplus value. This account brings into question the power of MacIntyre’s conception of practice and its common goods for handling structures of power based on gender, sex, and race in institutional frameworks.
