Maternity, Medicine and Power: Reproductive Decisions in Urban
Benin. Carolyn Fishel Sargent. Comparative Studies of Health
Systems and Medical Care, Vol. 22  Reviewed Publisher: 
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. 256 pp. $36.00
(cloth). Reviewed Title:  Maternity, Medicine and Power:
Reproductive Decisions in Urban BeninComparative Studies of
Health Systems and Medical Care, Vol. 22 (John M. Janzen, series
ed.) Reviewed Author:   This book constitutes a major step
forward in the understanding of a process that is affecting
every Third World nation: the wholesale adoption of an imported
Western model of birth. The deplorable lack in the ethnographic
literature of good cross-cultural studies of women and
reproduction will soon be eliminated if more studies like this
one are forthcoming.  Sargent's study primarily concerns the
factors that influence birth decisions made by the women of one
particular ethnic group in northern Benin, the Bariba. Much of
the value of this research lies in her skillfu