Care and Control in Birthing Practices to Conclude WHM

March 21, 2007 == MEDIA ADVISORY

Summary: Calvin College will conclude women's history month celebrations next
week with a talk on care and control in birthing practices.

Full story see http://www.calvin.edu/news/releases/2006-07/whm.htm

In celebration of Women’s History Month, the gender studies program at
Calvin College is hosting a lecture about childbirth from the point of view of
the person most intimately involved in the event: the mother.

“Who’s Having This Baby? How Care and Control Work in Birthing
Practices,” which commences at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 28 in the
Meeter Center Lecture Hall, is based on a book of the same title co-written by
communication arts and sciences professor Helen Sterk with four other scholars.

Sterk will share four stories from the book, which is created around a
collection of 130 interviews of women relating their birthing experiences.

“I started gathering the interviews about the time when I had had my
children,” Sterk says. “I was really wondering how a woman had a baby
without dying. I thought these stories need to be told so you can know what
women really go through. All these books from birthing that you can buy on
Amazon are written by experts: doctors, nurses, midwives. Very, very few from
the point of view of birthing women.”

The upcoming lecture is one in a series of celebrations of Women’s History
Month planned by Calvin’s gender studies department.

The final event will be a showing of the film, Iron-Jawed Angels at 7 p.m. on
Thursday, March 29 in the Robert L. Bytwerk Video Theater at Calvin.

Contact Helen Sterk at hsterk@calvin.edu or 616-526-6322

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Received on Wed Mar 21 08:49:14 2007