Ina May's Guide to Childbirth

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I'm not squeamish, I'm a nurse, but as a woman trying to prepare to have a baby in a few months I don't want to fill my head with stories and statistics about women who die in the process of labor; unnecessary stress and certainly not empowering for me. I plan to go without pain meds for as long as I can but if labor goes on too long, or gets to be too much, or if I have to be induced (which is looking likely) I am open to the meds. 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. I am going to be a first time mum in three months and for me the issue of birth has been very daunting.

One tip: the author claims you'll get through your contractions better if you express words of love to your partner during them. Many women feel so ashamed about things like miscarriages, epidurals, c-sections, breastfeeding difficulties, formula feeding, etc.The international hospital that I will be giving birth at does routine Rhogam injections at 28 weeks.

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. Here's the thing (and I'm finally getting to the book review part of this review, I promise): Motherhood has become a competitive sport in our culture. This very lengthy review might suggest that I didn't like this book or that I majorly disagreed with the author. s are not critical thinkers (or at least haven't been taught this vital skill in medical school) and that they don't have time to read recent studies. It seems to have established itself as a classic in the “birth world” so I was highly expecting to enjoy it and glean a lot of helpful information from it.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. The science cited here, along with hospital procedures generally, is pretty outdated, which works nicely for the book's preferred method of persuasion: scare tactics. 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.