Objective: This study examined women's perceptions and reported effects of routine, primary care-based interventions to increase breastfeeding. Subjects and Methods: A subsample (n = 67) of participants in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) completed semistructured exit interviews at 6 months postpartum. RCT arms included the following: (a) routine pre-/ postnatal lactation consultant (LC) support (LC group); (b) electronic prompts (EP) guiding providers to discuss breastfeeding during prenatal care visits (EP group); (c) a combined intervention (LC + EP group); and (d) controls. Interview transcripts were coded and analyzed in MAX.qda. Results: Key findings included the following: (1) Brief, non-directive assessment of feeding via postpartum interviews focused attention upon feeding practices. When coupled with breastfeeding promotion interventions, interviews promoted breastfeeding. (2) The EP and LC interventions were complementary: EPs influenced initiation, while LCs helped overcome barriers and sustain breastfeeding. (3) Prenatal intent to feed both breastmilk and formula was associated with the greatest receptivity to study messages. Conclusions: Findings underscore the need for interventions across the continuum of care. Trained LCs in prenatal/postpartum settings and prenatal care providers play important complementary roles that, when coupled with brief telephone feeding assessments, may improve breastfeeding rates.

Women's rights to legal abortion in the United States are now facing their greatest social and legislative challenges since its 1973 legalization. Legislation restricting rights and access to abortion care has been passed at state and federal levels at an unprecedented rate. Given the renewed vigor of anti-abortion movements, we call on anthropologists to engage with this shifting landscape of reproductive politics. This article examines recent legislation that has severely limited abortion access and maps possible directions for future anthropological analysis. We argue that anthropology can provide unique contributions to broader abortion research. The study of abortion politics in the United States today is not only a rich opportunity for applied and policy-oriented ethnographic research. It also provides a sharply focused lens onto broader theoretical concerns in anthropology and new social formations across moral, medical, political, and scientific fields in 21st-century America.

Drawing on ethnographic data collected over 13 months of fieldwork in family doctor clinics in Havana from 2004 to 2005, I examine the shifting moral and material economies of Cuban socialist medical practice. In both official ideology and in daily practice, the moral economy of ideal socialist medicine is based on an ethos of reciprocal social exchange-that is, the gift-that informs not only doctors' relationships with the Cuban state and with individual patients but also the state's policies of international medical service to developing nations. The social and economic upheavals after the fall of t Soviet Union, however, have compelled both the state and individual doctors to operate in a new local and global economy. The gift remains the central metaphor of Cuban medical practice. Nonetheless, as ideologies and practices of gifting and reciprocity encounter an emerging market economy, gifts--whether on the level of the state policies of international humanism or in patient-doctor relations--are open to new significations that highlight the shifting material and moral economies of post-Soviet Cuba.

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