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

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It seems to have established itself as a classic in the “birth world” so I was highly expecting to enjoy it and glean a lot of helpful information from it. My husband, Ron, had gone to work for the maker of the world's fastest supercomputers and was stationed at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. 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. These verses do not say that pain during childbirth begins at the Curse, but only that it is multiplied.

Finally, in the middle of a Star Trek rerun, while my body was positioning itself in contorted ways all over the chair I was trying to sit in, I concluded that I had better see a midwife.Ina May Gaskin, MA, CPM, is founder and director of the Farm Midwifery Center, located near Summertown, Tennessee. No one has explained the situation more succinctly than Stephen King in his novella "The Breathing Method. With Gaskin’s timeless wisdom, you can approach birth with confidence and excitement, wherever and however it happens.

When I asked to not have an episiotomy, he skirted the issue entirely by asking me what kind of episiotomy I meant, never once saying whether he would or would not give me one. Plus, she used the terms "Much more likely" or "much less likely" a lot, instead of giving the actual statistics as Goer's book did. Her constant reminder that deliveries at her clinic rarely need medical intervention doesn't paint a full picture. Wie Ina May über die Geburt schreibt, lässt einen an sich selbst glauben und gibt einem gleichzeitig Kraft und Motivation.

It was at that point that I knew I didn't want this man touching me--and internal exams were to begin in two weeks. I also feel that it's it's ignorant to promote your near "perfect stats" when you only accept perfect patients to start. The best thing about this book is that it describes birth as a completely natural thing for a woman's body to do and that it's not at all scary, which is a relief after our culture's fear-mongering around birth.

Yes, I knew the mechanics, how the body responded, what happened, but I was totally ignorant as to how hospitals and medical professionals responded to childbirth. Here's the birth plan: We go to the hospital, and we come out with a healthy baby, and two healthy moms. Most pain is in the mind, and when a woman absorbs the idea that the act of giving birth is excruciatingly painful--when she gets this information from her mother, her sisters, her married friends, and her physician--that woman has been mentally prepared to feel great agony.While she does in many places provide good information, do not be fooled into thinking she is at all, in any way an objective or unbiased resource!

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.And this insane social pressure on moms begins even before kids are born, in the Natural Childbirth movement that this book represents. I just let them come as fast as they wanted to, knowing that would help the birth happen without delay.