Ina May's Guide to Childbirth

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My wife and I have two boys: she carried and birthed the oldest; I carried and birthed the youngest. 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. 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. Again, this is something that people don't tend to speak about in daily conversation - so I am really grateful to Gaskin for opening up the world of childbirth to me with this book!

She emphasized a few things that focused on self-pleasure; during a time when a woman is delivering a baby into the world, I believe that herself should not be the primary thing on her mind. Ina May pushes back against the idea that midwives can only be present for “normal,” non-complicated births and includes stories of breech babies, shoulder dystocia, women who were told they had a too small pelvis, etc.As a believer, I should accept that there are parts of life that will be painful and not try to eliminate the discomfort outright, but trust God’s providence through it. One tip: the author claims you'll get through your contractions better if you express words of love to your partner during them. In 1997, she received the ASPO/Lamaze Irwin Chabon Award and the Tennessee Perinatal Association Recognition Award.

First of all, the birth experiences at the beginning, while somewhat nauseating, were also very encouraging.Overall I took one star away for the amount of birth stories (127 pages worth) and the fact that they were very old. These stories are all from the 1970s so I felt like I was reading a history book since I am so far removed from that age group. 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. And this insane social pressure on moms begins even before kids are born, in the Natural Childbirth movement that this book represents.

The words are not just words on a page, they are like maps leading the way to a new thinking, maps you could look at over and over well in advance of pregnancy, until the day you're ready to follow the map for real to your own destination. 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.s. I also would have been interested to learn what percentage of high-risk pregnancies the hospitals have/had and if these were included in the statistics she used to compare to "The Farm". I also feel that it's it's ignorant to promote your near "perfect stats" when you only accept perfect patients to start. Indeed, after reading her Guide to Childbirth and speaking to other mothers about it, I am inclined to agree!

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. It has helped me and countless other women to overcome standard western views of children, namely fear and of childbirth, and it also demonstrates that there simply is no 'one size fits all' in labour: all women labour differently, and all women can be aided by different methods to ease their labour experiences. Some of the most striking evidence Gaskin cites to support this idea comes from studies of childbirth in modern Scandinavia, which she outlines in the book. Still, I would recommend reading Henci Goer's book in conjunction with this for a slightly more even-handed, useful approach to the topic.Here's the birth plan: We go to the hospital, and we come out with a healthy baby, and two healthy moms. I liked reading about what the women did to cope with pain/lessen the pain and the various ways they pushed out their babies. and reading the whole first section, with all these AMAZING stories of natural childbirth just made me feel like i was a complete and total failure and less than a real woman for never having gone that route. And although I know that natural birth hasn't changed all that much since then, I felt that the hospital parts of the various stories were grossly unfair--although interesting!