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This paper critically discusses recent attempts to estimate long-term trends in the stillbirth rate for England and Wales. It assesses the available historical evidence for the level of late-fetal mortality, drawing especially on examples from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. A theoretical fetal–infant life table for a high-mortality population is also outlined as a means of analysing the relationship between segments of the conception-to-first-birthday mortality curve. Finally, new estimates of the stillbirth rate for England and Wales are proposed, based on variations in the early neonatal and maternal mortality rates during the 1930s. These estimates are substantially lower than the earlier estimates and are more in keeping with the available evidence from northern Europe. The implications of the revised estimates for interpretations of historical changes in mortality patterns are also considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to two ongoing debates among demographers. One deals with the immediate and deferred health effects of childbearing in the past, and the other with competing explanations--the frailty and insult accumulation hypotheses--for differences in individual health later in life. The study population consists of working women who lived at four locales in England and Wales in parts of the period 1778-1929 and who were under observation for incapacitating sickness during and after their childbearing years. Mothers within the study population are contrasted with a comparison group made up principally of non-mothers. The mothers began their reproductive careers with an advantage in health that was especially evident in the duration of sickness episodes. Even though individual births were less hazardous than individual sicknesses at the same ages, the cumulative effect of childbearing appears to have eroded the mothers' advantage. By ages 50-74 the mothers resembled the comparison group in health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1989 privatization of the water supply sector in England and Wales is a much-cited model of market environmentalism—the introduction of market institutions to natural resource management as a means of reconciling goals of efficiency and environmental conservation. Yet, more than a decade after privatization, the application of market mechanisms to water supply management is much more limited than had been expected. Drawing on recent geographical research on commodities, this article analyzes the reasons for this retrenchment of the market environmentalist project. I make three related claims: resource commodification is a contested, partial, and transient process; commodification is distinct from privatization; and fresh water is a particularly uncooperative commodity. To illustrate these claims, I explore how water's geography underpinned the failure of commodification initiatives in England and Wales. I focus specifically on contradictions faced by industry regulators, water companies, and the government when attempting to implement direct competition, universal metering, and full-cost pricing of water supply. The failure to resolve these contradictions was a critical driver in the reregulation of the water supply industry and in the overall trend toward improvement in environmental and drinking water quality, a finding that underpins my closing argument—that neoliberalization is implicated in processes of reregulation that rescript the entitlements of both humans and nonhumans, with outcomes that are not necessarily negative for what we conventionally delimit as the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]