Ina May's Guide to Childbirth: Updated With New Material

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Everything you need to know to have the best birth experience for you, from the world's leading midwife I have completely immersed myself in the education and evidence-based information regarding childbirth, and continue to be blown away by what I am just now learning and what so many of us are never told and just accept and falsely trust more than we really should. Unfortunately, the vast majority of it was filled with messages of female empowerment and a clear bias against anything having to do with modern medicine. I agree that perhaps we’ve gone too far in automatically medicalizing pregnancy and birth, but it is undeniable that medicine has saved many lives of mothers and babies who have had extreme complications during this stage of life as well. Ina May Gaskin’s overall tone and overemphasis on the negative statistics of giving birth in hospitals strike me as scare tactics to drive mothers to favor her preferred method of delivery: the home birth. Laura found this first edition (1975) at the flea market next door. How could we turn this down? It's the first hand account - told by the mothers and fathers and midwives - of about 200 of the 372 births (thus far) on a giant culty hippie baby making farm in Tennessee. Followed by instructions for prenatal and neonatal care for parents and midwives. The hippie slang is unreal. A good example: I was also impressed by the clarity of the writing. Even though Gaskin is clearly on one side of the childbirth debate, she didn't come off sounding like a crazy. I was able to respect her even when (in a few cases) I didn't agree with her.

Sometimes the stories seemed to get off-topic. They often focused on how wonderful the farm was versus how the women handled birth. There was a story about abortion that while interesting, really didn't go into very much detail about the birth. Whether it's hormones or hypnobirthing, stretch marks or swollen ankles, it's always reassuring to know YANBU when moaning about your pregnancy ailments. Huge caveat, though: this book removed my fear of childbirth but gave me a new and overwhelming terror of hospitals. I found this to be true of most natural childbirth books (with some exceptions, including my favorite Birthing from Within): the confidence they gave me in my body's ability to give birth came at the cost of a raging fear of hospitals and "non-natural" childbirth. Ina May made me terrified of mainstream medicine's approach to birth, and the book got hard to read at a certain point because I was like, "Yeah, sure, this birth would be wonderful if I were doing it on Ina May's hippie commune, but since I'm doing it in a shitty Miami hospital those doctors are going to cut me up into pieces and mess up my baby with all kinds of unnecessary and frightening interventions. Eek!" I wound up spending a lot of my pregnancy terrified of what would happen to me at the hospital, and convinced that medical professionals would make traumatic what would otherwise be an awesome and beautiful experience. The book is written with the kind of conviction that can feel, I don't know, maybe condescending? A little like "I have found truth and if this doesn't work for you, it's probably because you're repressed and have been brainwashed by patriarchy and big pharma." Motherhood is Not a Competition: Why Pressure Moms to Strive for the "Perfect" Natural Childbirth (and make them feel guilty if that isn't in the cards)? Now that my youngest (and probably last, alas) son is a year old, I feel like I have enough distance to be able to write this review. My wife and I have two boys: she carried and birthed the oldest; I carried and birthed the youngest. My wife went first for several reasons, not least of which was that I had have a real and irrational fear of childbirth. The hope was that Pelly's birth experience would be smooth, and having observed it, I'd feel better when my turn came around. Knowledge is power, right?

8. Best pregnancy book for dads: The Pregnancy Guide for Men

I will admit it's not a book I read or would recommend reading from cover to cover, and also not one I'd recommend at the end of your pregnancy, because I believe there comes a point where one should disengage from others' experience of birth and focus on the birth, you, your baby and your birthing team are creating. The Farm as the epitome of a great environment but the percentage of women who are actually going to birth there is negligible so why not talk a little more about some other great birthing environments or ways to make a birthing environment great. The book starts off with a bunch of birth stories. I was excited to read about birth in a positive light. However, there were several factors that made the stories less helpful. Over half of the birth stories took place in the 1970's and 1980's. So I personally felt some disconnect from reading about women who could be my mom! And although I know that natural birth hasn't changed all that much since then, I felt that the hospital parts of the various stories were grossly unfair--although interesting! It's safe to say that hospitals have come a long way since the 70's and 80's! Stories from the modern day in various environments (i.e. hospital, birthing center, home) would have been much more helpful to me. Not to be confused with hypnosis, hypnobirthing teaches a variety of relaxation and breathing techniques to help mums-to-be work with their body to make their labour a more calm and comfortable experience. With a focus on educating and changing your mindset, away from fear and negativity and towards enablement and empowerment, hypnobirthing has grown hugely in popularity over recent years. I experienced some confusion about "The Farm". A better introduction that explained exactly what the farm was would have been helpful. As it was, it took a me a bit of reading to piece together exactly how the farm worked. And I still imagine people living on buses or in tents like a couple of the stories mentioned. Maybe that's really how "The Farm" functions.

Covers a lot of ground - you may want something more focused on a specific area of pregnancy or childbirth If you’re considering starting a family or taking steps towards conceiving, you may prefer a book that is focused on fertility and conception rather than pregnancy.

What to look for in a pregnancy book

Drawing on over 40 years' experience, internationally acclaimed midwife Ina May Gaskin shows you how to use the mind-body connection to help labour progress calmly and safely. The author herself seems to be very particular about what she wants from clients and seems to put a lot of the burden on the laboring woman to "be nice," and I don't believe that that's necessarily the energy that works for everyone