Other Books
Also by Lauren K. Hall
The Medicalization of Birth and Death
Improving how individuals give birth and die in the United States requires reforming the regulatory, reimbursement, and legal structures that centralize care in hospitals and prevent the growth of community-based alternatives.
In 1900, most Americans gave birth and died at home, with minimal medical intervention. By contrast, most Americans today begin and end their lives in hospitals. The medicalization we now see is due in large part to federal and state policies that draw patients away from community-based providers, such as birth centers and hospice care, and toward the most intensive and costliest kinds of care. But the evidence suggests that birthing and dying people receive too much―even harmful―medical intervention.
In The Medicalization of Birth and Death, political scientist Lauren K. Hall describes how and why birth and death became medicalized events. While hospitalization provides certain benefits, she acknowledges, it also creates harms, limiting patient autonomy, driving up costs, and causing a cascade of interventions, many with serious side effects. Tracing the regulatory, legal, and financial policies that centralize care during birth and death, Hall argues that medicalization reduces competition, stifles innovation, and prevents individuals from accessing the most appropriate care during their most vulnerable moments. She also examines the profound implications of policy-enforced medicalization on informed consent and shows how medicalization challenges the healthcare community's most foundational ethical commitments.
Drawing on interviews with medical and nonmedical healthcare providers, as well as surveys of patients and their families, Hall provides a broad overview of the costs, benefits, and origins of medicalized birth and death. The Medicalization of Birth and Death is required reading for academics, patients, providers, policymakers, and anyone else interested in how policy shapes healthcare options and limits patients and providers during life's most profound moments.
Johns Hopkins University Press; 1st edition
Hardcover, 352 pages
ISBN-10: 1421433338
ISBN-13: 978-1421433332
Family and the Politics of Moderation:
Private Life, Public Goods, and the Rebirth of Social Individualism
In Family and the Politics of Moderation, Lauren K. Hall argues that the family is a fulcrum upon which societal values balance.
Hall describes a set of intermediate institutions that hold the power to alter polarized political and cultural views--churches, religious institutions, local governments, social organizations, and importantly, the family. For Hall the family moderates between broad collectivity and strict individualism. She contends that the family as an intermediate entity wields the strength to guide society between extreme viewpoints, be they social, political, or cultural. Family and the Politics of Moderation thus generates an imperative to ensure the survival of the family as an integral pillar of society.
Baylor University Press
Hardcover, 200 pages
ISBN-10: 1602588015
ISBN-13: 978-1602588011