Marketizing Maternity by Janet E Perkins

Marketizing Maternity by Janet E Perkins

Marketizing Maternity investigates the transformation of childbirth in Bangladesh over two short decades, from an in-home, nonmedical experience into one that is not only almost universally medicalized but also commodified. Today, most women give birth in biomedical facilities, and half do so surgically, largely through a minimally regulated health marketplace.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with women, families, health workers, and policymakers across national, periurban, and rural contexts, Janet E. Perkins examines how technologies, markets, and values intertwine to reshape maternity. Through this process, cesarean and ultrasonography technologies have proliferated in places where biomedical expertise is sparse, health systems are fragmented, and infrastructures are unreliable. Paradoxically, these same processes have made such technologies accessible across social classes, geographies, and means. Marketizing Maternity demonstrates how such transformations inspire new imaginaries of care, redefine how pregnancy and childbirth are navigated, sustain formal and informal livelihoods, and ignite moral anxieties and negotiations. At a moment of global reckoning with health privatization, Perkins reveals how marketization both unsettles and sustains moralities, infrastructures, and forms of care within and beyond biomedicine.

Janet E. Perkins is Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on health and biomedical technologies in reproductive health, toxicity, and global health practice.