Researchers reflect on sociocultural aspects of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and critically analyze the epidemic's effects on pregnant mothers and their babies. We address structural inequalities contributing to poor maternal health in lower-income countries, while reflecting on how the Ebola outbreak highlights the still-marginalized role of pregnant women. Drawing on prior research in West and East Africa, we discuss health care providers' responses to risk of infection during maternity work under normal circumstances and in times of crisis. We end with recommendations for preventing such detrimental effects on the health of pregnant women in the case of another epidemic.

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.

Most scholarship on stigma begins with an explanation of Erving Goffman's Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Goffman 1963). However, since Goffman's now-classic work on the subject, there have been many linguistic shifts, conceptual slippages, and new contributions to the theorization and understanding of stigma. More recent interpretations of stigma emphasize the psychological and social aspects of stigma, as well as highlight the critical role of power and systemic inequalities which can work to produce or reinforce existing stigmas (Castro and Farmer 2005; Parker and Aggleton 2003). Link and Phelan (2001) stipulate that, in order for stigma to develop, there must be an element of power involved; they do not specifically state who it is that is exercising the power they mention, but surely the differential exists in favor of those doing the stigmatizing. Similarly, Castro and Farmer (2005) argue that for a more nuanced understanding of stigma and its effects in an infectious disease and treatment context, the power structures and inequities that produce poor access to care and treatment should be an integral component of the analysis of stigma production. Parker and Aggleton (2003:13) also argue that stigma "feeds upon, strengthens and reproduces existing inequalities of class, race, gender, and sexuality." There are a number of possible definitions of stigma. Parker and Aggleton (2003) suggest that many times, stemming from Goffman (though, they say, perhaps mistakenly so), authors treat stigma as an individual process and as a static, fixed item that exists. However, they argue that stigma also "plays a key role in producing and reproducing power relations and control…To properly understand issues of stigmatization and discrimination…requires us to think more broadly about how some individuals and groups come to be socially excluded, and about the forces that create and reinforce exclusion in different settings," advocating for analysis of stigma that takes into account its fluid and generative capabilities (Parker and Aggleton 2003:16). Parker and Aggleton (2003) further argue that conceptualizing

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