Crowning (True Stories of Birthing and Women in Nepal)

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Proceeds from sale of this book will support safe birthing education in Nepal.

Geeta Pfau is uniquely qualified to write this book given her experience and training as a nurse and midwife in Nepal. She completed a Ph.D. at the University of Connecticut specializing in community medicine, medical anthropology, and health education.

She has more than 30 years'experience as a global health consultant teaching, working, and researching around the world. She has served as a health educator and trainer of nurses and traditional birth attendants in Africa and Nepal, and was a professor of women's studies and global health in the United States.

Her current research focuses on birthing practices and unwanted pregnancies leading to unsafe abortions and preventable maternal deaths. She is the main author of HIV/AIDS at Universities and Colleges: The Epidemic Emerges from Hiding (Windhoek: Gamsberg Macmillan, 2004).

"Crowning" is a vivid and passionate tapestry of life, childbirth and the harsh realities of reproduction among Nepali girls and women. Based in good part on the author's own personal experiences, this is an adventure in medical anthropology that weaves together culture and medicine in an easy story-telling style that is accessible and readable. It is candid. It is sensitive, It is heart-felt. It is valuable and timely".

- >EAN A. TATE, Ph.D. International and Development Educator, USA

[This is] a very interesting and readable book, that combines ethnography, historical change, cultural realism, and personal memoir. The anecdotes in this book are sensitive and gendered, rich and textured. The insights of this 'insider'author carry the reader deeply into the reproductive and sexual lives of Nepali girls and women in ways that go far beyond the dry scientific writing that so often tries to speak for, not by Nepali women themselves.'

-TOM BARTON, M.D., Creative Research and Evaluation Centre, Uganda

This book is centered on true stories of Chanchala and Geeta, sisters who were both midwives in Kathmandu, Nepal, during the second half of the 20th century.

Initially, Chanchala trained as a nurse/midwife on-the-job, since there were no nursing or midwifery schools in Nepal at the time. Later, she attended midwifery training and, during the early 1950s, a three year nursing course in India. For several decades throughout the late 1940s, '50s and '60s, she also worked with Dr. Rana, who was Nepal's first female physician, and with the royal physician Dr. Jit Singh Malla in Kathmandu.

Chanchala took calls at all hours of the day and night, delivering babies at people's homes. She delivered baby after baby with her bare hands onto fresh, loose, disposable straw mats. The women usually lay on the floor on a clutch of rags or the straw birthing mat to absorb the blood flow during and after deliveries. She also routinely took care of women who suffered from illnesses related to female issues such as vaginal infection/discharge, dysmenorrhea, and infertility.

Chanchala also secretly helped women terminate unwanted pregnancies, an act illegal in Nepal until 2002. Since 2002, termination of pregnancies by medical professionals (abortion) has been legally permitted during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy and up to eighteen weeks in case of rape, incest, and fetal malformation or when a woman's life is endangered.