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

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Long story short (seriously, I just wrote my whole birth saga in 10 long paragraphs and deleted them because this is a BOOK REVIEW), my birth did not go according to plan either. Reading this book gave me the confidence to know that I am capable of a natural and pain- relief free birth if I open my mind to the fact that my body is able to do it.

I mean stories that change you because you read or heard them, because the teller of the story taught you something you didn't know before or helped you look at things from a different angle than you ever had before. For example, Rhogham does not have any mercury whatsoever any more, and the danger from amniocentesis is vastly overstated. Drawing upon her thirty-plus years of experience, Ina May Gaskin, the nation’s leading midwife, shares the benefits and joys of natural childbirth by showing women how to trust in the ancient wisdom of their bodies for a healthy and fulfilling birthing experience. I worried about giving birth - about how long it would take and how much it would hurt and whether or not I would grunt - but I never worried about dying.

Commenting on the fear many women have of birth, his fictional character observes, "Believe me: if you are told that some experience is going to hurt, it will hurt. My wife went first for several reasons, not least of which was that I had have a real and irrational fear of childbirth. Hate the sin, not the sinner" sort of thinly-veiled shaming that I don't care for from any ideology. While these are certainly useful as illustrative examples of how it all goes down, they tend to get rather repetitive and could certainly stand to be scaled back a bit.

It took a lot of the mystery away and clarified that labor was more than "hours of the worst pain in your life and very scary" like everyone tells you. When reading you do get a clear idea of how experienced of a midwife Ina May is and you can respect her talent and expertise in her field.For this reason, Part I of this book is largely devoted to stories told by women who planned to have home or birth-center births with me and my midwife partners. The first half of the book is a compilation of natural childbirth stories written by mothers who've either done it at The Farm, or somehow in conjunction with the author. I think what intrigued me most about this book were the parts where Ina May spoke on sexual acts furthering along labor. This very lengthy review might suggest that I didn't like this book or that I majorly disagreed with the author.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.We need to change the view that childbirth is something dangerous and unnatural, and that the only way for women to survive it is to be heavily medicated and close to an emergency room. The Hebrew word for “pain” in these verses translates closely to “work” and I think that these are two things that are easily confused in our minds since we, for the most part, do not live in a society filled with hardship. One of the very few stipulations my wife made after we learned we were going to have a child is that I read this book by the doyenne of natural childbirth in the U. The birth stories in the beginning of the book were interesting and heart warming (although I'll admit, a few were just plain weird!