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Cover image for book Documenting Death

Documenting Death

Maternal Mortality and the Ethics of Care in Tanzania
By:Adrienne E. Strong
Publisher:University of California Press
Print ISBN:9780520310704
eText ISBN:9780520973916
Edition:1
Copyright:2020
Format:Reflowable

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Documenting Death is a gripping ethnographic account of the deaths of pregnant women in a hospital in a low-resource setting in Tanzania. Through an exploration of everyday ethics and care practices on a local maternity ward, anthropologist Adrienne E. Strong untangles the reasons Tanzania has achieved so little sustainable success in reducing maternal mortality rates, despite global development support. Growing administrative pressures to document good care serve to preclude good care in practice while placing frontline healthcare workers in moral and ethical peril. Maternal health emergencies expose the precarity of hospital social relations and accountability systems, which, together, continue to lead to the deaths of pregnant women.