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Birth Wars
  • Published: 23 February 2027
  • ISBN: 9780241720929
  • Imprint: Allen Lane
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $65.00

Birth Wars

Delivering Safe Maternity in a Changing World

Formats & editions
Hardback
23 Feb 2027
EBook
28 Jan 2027
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A midwife investigates how maternity care highlights the most pressing social and economic challenges around the world

Giving birth is everyone’s business.

In this book, midwife and bestselling author Leah Hazard takes us from luxurious birthing suites to maximum-security prisons, from border-town clinics to refugee camps, freebirthing communities to wards dominated by algorithms, showing how childbirth provides a startling lens onto the biggest issues of our time. With clarity and curiosity, Hazard explores how inequality, migration, climate change and political currents are shaping this universal yet intimate human experience, revealing the competing forces that are battling to technologize, moralize, commoditize and dominate the birth space in ways that have already transformed our bodies and our world.

In exposing the fragility of modern industrialized maternity care Birth Wars issues a warning and a rallying cry: highlighting the transformative – or destructive – power of this essential act, not only for the person giving birth, but also for the child who bears the lifelong effects of that day, and for society as a whole.
  • Published: 23 February 2027
  • ISBN: 9780241720929
  • Imprint: Allen Lane
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $65.00
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About the author

Leah Hazard

Leah Hazard studied English Literature at Harvard University and worked in journalism before retraining and qualifying as a midwife in 2013. Her memoir, Hard Pushed: A Midwife’s Story, was a Sunday Times bestseller, and her next book, Womb: The Inside Story of Where We All Began, was Scottish Book of the Year and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Leah lives in Scotland, where she continues to work for the NHS and advocate for safer, more equitable maternity care.
LH

Also by Leah Hazard

Hard Pushed
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Praise for Birth Wars

Praise for Leah Hazard

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It is her capacity to love and give so personally to the many thousands of women she has worked with which imbues this book with its power

Julia Samuel

Brings the maternity ward to life in all its gory, humorous and touching glory

Telegraph

Leah Hazard expertly blends science with passion

Rachel Clarke, author of <i> The Story of a Heart </i>

Leah Hazard is a brilliant storyteller

Katherine May, author of <i> Wintering </i>

Hazard's eye is keen, her range broad, and her tone scrupulously compassionate

Publisher's Weekly