Ina May's Guide to Childbirth

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Her promotion of a low-intervention but extremely effective method for dealing with one of the most-feared birth complications, shoulder dystocia, has resulted in that method being adopted by a growing number of practitioners. We took the classes, I talked to other moms, I read everything I could get my hands on (including this book), I read a billion birth stories on birthwithoutfear, but in this case, Knowledge was NOT Power.

For a nerd as myself, I really enjoyed her insight and you cannot help to be incredibly impressed by the track record for Ina May as a midwife.The collection of honest birth stories and the detailed information about the processes of birth soothe any fears future parents might have. If the natural childbirth books hadn't made me so insanely fearful of what labor in the hospital would be like, I would've gone in earlier and probably wound up taking drugs, which I really didn't want to do. Even though Gaskin is clearly on one side of the childbirth debate, she didn't come off sounding like a crazy.

It is informative, well written, and provides invaluable support in helping women to make their own birth decisions in a society that sometimes forgets how important the mental wellbeing of the mother is. My body is capable of giving birth unmedicated without interventions because that's the way it was created. Our culture really does make a medicalized birth seem normal, when in reality, the opposite is true. Going into it with that specific plan is great, but I think women need to realize it doesn't always work out this way. I liked reading about what the women did to cope with pain/lessen the pain and the various ways they pushed out their babies.When my turn came around, I still felt woefully unprepared and not a little bit terrified of childbirth. I appreciated the positive attitude toward the body and the amazing things it can do if you just let it. I felt like my body had betrayed me by failing at this most basic task of womanhood, which my female relatives have done countless times without issue.

Update three years later: I think of this book's discussion of sphincters every time I try to get 30 seconds of privacy to go to the bathroom. Overall I took one star away for the amount of birth stories (127 pages worth) and the fact that they were very old. She shuns prudishness in our culture, and encourages women to make birth (or, rather, allow birth) to be a sexual experience, yet totally respects the fact that most women are too prudish to have a stranger (especially a man) in the birthing room with them, without adverse effects to the progress of labor. 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. 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.So instead of promoting dangerous ideas that science shouldn't be used or trusted, let's get science and midwifery to complement each other. Although Ina May may seem hippie dippie to some (she does include some out there ideas), her relationship to OBs in Tennessee, her birth stats from the thousands of births she’s attended, and her balance between respecting ancient wisdom/intuitive, physiologic birthing and scientific data all make her a wonderful person to learn about the beautiful process of birth from. In the case of Ina May, I'm a little embarrassed that the whole thing kind of makes my blood run cold. The first part consists of a collection of birth stories from women on The Farm and women who interacted with midwives from The Farm.