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The use of markets and market mechanisms to deliver care services is growing in both liberal and social democratic welfare states. This article examines debates and policies concerning the marketisation of eldercare and childcare in Sweden, England and Australia. It shows how market discourses and practices intersect with, reinforce or challenge traditions and existing policies and examines whether care markets deliver user empowerment and greater efficiency. Markets for eldercare and childcare have developed in uneven and context specific ways with varying consequences. Both politics and policy history help to shape market outcomes.

List of Tables Acknowledgements List of Contributors Introduction: From Labour to Care The' Family Wage': Some Problems for Socialists and Feminists M.Barrett & M.McIntosh Women's Domestic Labour J.Gardiner, S.Himmelweit & M.Macintosh Capital Restructuring and the Domestic Economy: A Marxist Alternative to Materialism J.Wheelock Domestic Labour and Employment Status Among Married Couples: A Case-study in Hartlepool L.Morris Domestic Labour Revisited: A Feminist Critique of Marxist Economics J.Gardiner The Discovery of 'Unpaid Work': The Social Consequences of the Expansion of 'Work' S.Himmelweit The Contingent Household: Gender Relations and the Economics of Unpaid Labour M.Macintosh Household Structures and Nutrition: Some Contradictions in Provisioning Norms D.Elson Challenging the New World (Dis)Order: Feminist Green Socialism M.Mellor References Index

In just over twenty years since the Abortion Act was passed in 1967 much has changed for women. Above all, the greater availability of abortion has brought increased sexual and economic freedom to those who do not wish to be or become pregnant. There have also been concomitant changes affecting those who do wish to bear a child. Some of these are the direct effect of the Act itself, such as the dramatic fall in the number of healthy babies put up for adoption, so that infertile women now are having to seek other means in order to be able to raise babies of their 'own', including various new technological methods of conception. Other changes are more indirect, such as the development of methods of pre-natal diagnosis of foetal disabilities, made worthwhile, from a medical point of view, only by the legality of abortion for affected foetuses.