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

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S. While the tone of the book is much too touchy-feely/hippyish for me, I have to admit that it is well worth reading regardless of whether you're planning a natural childbirth or a fully tech'ed out hospital one. Even if it has not been your habit throughout your life so far, I recommend that you learn to think positively about your body. Although based in america you are able to read her book and acknowledge (being uk based) that much of what she says can be transferred to the uk system (in regards to the fear of birth in our culture and the risk averse medicalised model of birth still largely present in the UK, leading to a cascade of intervention). I enjoyed how the midwives paid attention to every detail and looked at things intuitively as well as on the surface. This bothered me, but I knew this was about as magnanimous as he was going to get, so I let it slide.

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. How can something so painful, so medical, so dangerous be anything somebody could enjoy, especially without any drugs?

That said, it would be very easy to read it as gospel and get swept up in its giddy repudiation of modern medicine, so one should approach it with, if not a skeptical eye, at least with one's critical faculties fully engaged.

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.She’s such an important voice in the birth world and reading her work will likely make you feel more at ease and (dare I say) even excited about giving birth. Finally, in the seventh month, the doctor said there could be no Leboyer birth,* after leading me to believe all these months there would be.

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. These verses do not say that pain during childbirth begins at the Curse, but only that it is multiplied.

I realized that I was truly blessed, that there really were some things on which technology could not improve--one of those was the billion-year-old evolutionary process of human childbirth. 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. Now that birth has become a favorite subject of television dramas and situation comedies, this trend has been even more pronounced. Hate the sin, not the sinner" sort of thinly-veiled shaming that I don't care for from any ideology. The benefits of medical tests were skimmed over while the possible harm of these tests was thoroughly covered.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. That said, though, there are perfectly valid reasons why some of us do give birth in hospitals, and not all hospital births are the nightmare that natural childbirth books make them out to be. while i will admit that a lot of the information was very interesting, i disliked the fear-mongering it produced with regards to all things hospital-related-childbirth.i liked the second part more, and found the information thought-provoking in many instances, but overall it left me worried and doubting my choice to use a doctor/hospital/epidural, etc. I also feel that it's it's ignorant to promote your near "perfect stats" when you only accept perfect patients to start.