Alana Apfel is a birth worker, writer, and community gardener. She is a graduate of the Anthropology and Social Change program of the California Institute of Integral Studies. As a birth justice activist she has been involved with the San Francisco General Hospital Doula Program, BirthWays community education center in Berkeley, and the growing international BirthKeepers coalition. She now lives and works in Bristol, UK, where she is part of the Positive Birth Movement and is training to be a midwife in the National Health Service. Birth Work as Care Work is her first book. Check out her personal website HERE.
Birth Work as Care Work: Stories from Activist Birth Communities
SKU: 9781629631516
Editors: Alana Apfel • Foreword: Loretta J. Ross • Preface: Victoria Law • Introduction: Silvia Federici
Publisher: PM Press/Kairos
ISBN: 9781629631516
Published: 5/2016
Format: Paperback, mobi, ePub, PDF
Size: 5 x 8
Page count: 152
Subjects: Health-Childbirth/Politics
Praise
“I love this book, all of it. The polished essays and the interviews
with birth workers dare to take on the deepest questions of human
existence.”
—Carol Downer, cofounder of the Feminist Women’s Heath Centers of California and author of A Woman’s Book of Choices
“This volume provides theoretically rich, practical tools for birth
workers and other care workers to collectively and effectively fight
capitalism and the many intersecting processes of oppression that
accompany it. Birth Work as Care Work forcefully and joyfully reminds us that the personal is political, a lesson we need now more than ever.”
—Adrienne Pine, author of Working Hard, Drinking Hard: On Violence and Survival in Honduras
“All we are doing in this world is living and dying, creating and
destroying. We generate new life in our children and in our ideas.
Becoming a birth supporter, getting to be an attendant to the miracle of
childbirth, has transformed my social justice work. Our visions for
justice are what we are birthing in this world. Learning to listen,
learning to trust the body and the people, and learning to breathe will
transform our movement work. Birth Work as Care Work demonstrates these lessons through showing us ways we can learn together to support the birth of new worlds.”
—Adrienne Brown, coeditor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements
“This book places the doula—as a caring birth activist—at the heart
of reproductive care work in our modern society. Doula, a new name for
an ancient traditional role, reappears today as women daring to reclaim
their power through birthing and caring for their children.”
—Valérie Dupin cofounder and cochair of the Association Doulas de France
“Alana Apfel is an artist and a robust one. Weaving the logic behind birth, care, and reproduction together, Birth Work as Care Work
documents how caregivers and communities are marginalized in society on
a daily basis whilst working to sustain themselves and ironically, to
sustain life itself. Her thesis seeks to put the human back into being.”
—Chitra Subramaniam, editor in chief of The News Minute
Book Events
april, 2024
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Reviews
- Birth Work as Care Work: Stories from Activist Birth Communities: A Review
- Birth Work as Care Work: A Review in SQUAT
- Birth Work as Care Work: A Review
- Birth Work as Care Work: A Review & Interview on Motherworldly
Interviews
Mentions
- Birth Work as Care Work Firestorm Books and Cafe 2016 Best Seller
- Radical Doula Profiles: Alana Apfel