Strong Adrienne E. Documenting Death: Maternal Mortality and the Ethics of Care in Tanzania

University of California Press, 2020. — 264 p. — ISBN 9780520310704.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.The Mawingu Regional Hospital Maternity Ward
Working in Scarcity
Protocols and Deviations: Good Enough Care
“Bad Luck,” Lost Babies, and the Structuring of Realities
Landscapes of Accountability in Care
The Stories We Tell about the Deaths We See
Already Dead
“Pregnancy Is Poison”: The Road to Maternal Death
The Meanings of Maternal Death
Epilogue