Ina Mays Guide To Childbirth

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Jenny, September 22, 2006 (view all comments by Jenny)
Ina May's Guide to Childbirth is a long-needed addition to modern-day natural childbirthing resources. In this easy-to-read text, Ina May Gaskin begins with numerous birth stories as told by women who've experienced the empowering gift of birthing children naturally. The stories illustrate the innate power of women's bodies to gestate and birth human life. In a culture infused with fear about childbirth, these stories offer the reader a different and healing perspective-- that childbirth is not an event to be feared, but rather to be revered and relished and learned from. Key to enabling the birthing women are the midwives who support and encourage them as the births of the babies unfold. The sense one gains as one reads the birthing stories is that birth is sacred and manageable and possible and glorious; indeed, empowering.

The second part of the text is a breakdown of the components of modern day birthing choices available to women in mainstream care. User-friendly explanations of each component enable expectant parents to understand the available choices fully, as well as to understand the risks inherant in each intervention or test or available mode of care.

[a]Ina May Gaskin is perhaps the world's most reknowned midwife. She and her husband Steven Gaskin helped establish The Farm, a community in Tennessee, at which a highly succesful birthing center operates. She has done more than possibly any other person to bring midwifery back to into the consciousness and use of American women. She was president of the Midwives' Alliance of North America from 1996 to 2002, and in 2003 was selected as Visiting Fellow of Morse College at Yale University. She lectures all over the world to physicians and midwives, as well as to lay people, on issues of midwifery and topics surrounding the increasing maternal mortality rate in the United States. She is known for her championing of low-intervention birth, as well as for the outstanding statistics garnered at the Farm's birthing center in outcomes for women and babies. [These statistics were published in "The Safety of Homebirth: The Farm Study," authored by A. Mark Durand in the American Journal of Public Health, March 1992, vol. 82, pp. 450-452.] Ina May Gaskin is also the author of Spiritual Midwifery, now in its 4th edition.[/a]

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Product Details

ISBN:

9780553381153

Author:

Gaskin, Ina May

Publisher:

Bantam

Location:

New York

Subject:

Pregnancy & Childbirth

Subject:

Natural childbirth

Subject:

Health and Medicine-General

Copyright:

2003

Edition Description:

Trade paper

Series Volume:

31

Publication Date:

20030331

Binding:

TRADE PAPER

Grade Level:

General/trade

Language:

English

Illustrations:

30 B/W ILLUSTRATIONS THRU/OUT

Pages:

368

Dimensions:

8.98 x 6 x .7 in 1.0625 lb