Ina May's Guide to Childbirth

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The whole intense experience was deeply invigorating and actually GAVE me the energy I needed to cope with the first couple of difficult weeks with a new baby. This is all well and good, I guess, if you are planning an all-natural home birth, but far from true for hospital births. I think she makes traditional clinical medicine and those that work in that field unnecessarily sterile and frightening while painting midwives and homebirth with rose colored glasses. It took me a long time to come around to my wife's way of thinking, and to be honest, I have moments when I'm not totally there yet.

I guess that's not a really bad thing, because it did pump me up for childbirth, but as Gaskin constantly refers to her experience birthing women on "The Farm" (I can't help but think of it in semi-sarcastic quotation marks), I kept thinking how her sample is made up of very naturalistic, in-touch women (read: hippies) and a woman like myself is likely to have a different experience in childbirth, even given the fact that my body really knows what to do. Still, I would recommend reading Henci Goer's book in conjunction with this for a slightly more even-handed, useful approach to the topic.

Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit. I read with particular interest her method for dealing with breech babies, which up until recently I had thought were something that required definite medical intervention. She and her husband founded The Farm Midwifery Centre in America in the 70s, which was one of the few birth centres in action at the time. As the occurrence of vaginal breech births has declined over the last 25 years, the knowledge and skill required for such births have come close to extinction. As long as readers don't lose sight of that, and start viewing doctors as the enemy and medical intervention as failures, this book contains a lot of useful information.

I believe that holistic health and modern medicine can complement each other and that both have their faults. Almost half of the book is "positive" stories of people choosing home birth and traumatic stories by these choosing a hospital. Ina May is very culturally aware of the challenges that face women and the times when they want or need medical help.

She does not shun the medical advances of the real world, but she has witnessed hundreds of births over decades and her perspective is that women's bodies are capable of more than is sometimes believed of them. Hospitals and doctors have come a loooong way in being more patient centered and accommodating women's wishes with childbirth.

But here's the thing -- I wonder sometime how often our deference for what we're told is good for us gets in the way of what really makes us comfortable. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. The first part is a compilation of birth stories from lots and lots of women; many will make you cry with joy. Unfortunately, with most natural birth books, there was a lot of new age and evolutionary content in the book.

Facebook sets this cookie to show relevant advertisements to users by tracking user behaviour across the web, on sites that have Facebook pixel or Facebook social plugin. However when talking about hospitals, doctors, nurses or anything else remotely “medical” she is short, terse, detached, and extremely clinical in her descriptions and quick to downplay their benefits whilst highlighting their every possible, minute flaws. Ina May's Guide to Childbirth is skewed toward natural childbirth and can get a little culty, especially all the stories about The Farm, but I found the information in the second part of the book really helpful even when planning for a hospital birth.