ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on changing birthing practices in the 'developing world', but with the focus on the minority with privileged access to an unusual degree of health care services. It also explores pregnancy and birth within domestic and kin relationships and as part of class-based identities. The chapter resituates the analysis of discourses on motherhood in South Asia within the framework of anthropology of kinship and reproduction view, which allows us to deal with the specific power relations this entails. The chapter explores the changes the health care system in urban India has undergone during the period of economic liberalization. It examines on assumptions regarding the reasons why women from very different backgrounds may have to agree to choose an interventionist procedure. A domestic perspective on childbirth and change does reveal why younger women are often envied by their mothers and grandmothers, who in the words of one elderly mother of three 'may have been stronger, but suffered more'.