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

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S. Her ideas about the fear of giving birth have to lead to a drastic change in the way many women and their caregivers or partners approach to birth, so that fear isn’t the primary feeling that accompanies it. There's greater romance than I'm telling here, because the book tells the story also of how this collective of midwives grew from Ina May to a raft of 'disciples' who lived in housebuses in a large community together and served the greater community. I am going to have to find out the current status of Ina May and this crazy hippie farm - old fashioned and conservative in its family values - and all its sister farms.

She is recognized as an authority on mother-led birth who caters to what the mother needs to have a positive and healthy birth. We learned this truth by observing many labors stop or slow down when someone entered the birth room who was not intimate with the laboring mother's feelings. Obviously if a woman feels cared for and relaxed and at ease, anything, including childbirth would be easier to get through. We were a transient population with no desire to leave a trail of debts behind us, and we had an ethic that did not allow us to accept welfare.Family members and friends are commonly in attendance and are encouraged to take an active role in the birth. Although the central theme of the book is midwifery, in essence, it's just this really, really amazing book that makes you feel incredible and powerful about being a woman. When I was looking for information on healthy, involved births, Ina May Gaskin provided a variety of experiences in this book. As anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd has described in detail, underlying the technocratic mode of care of our own time is an assumption that the human body is a machine and that the female body in particular is a machine full of shortcomings and defects. They teach us the occasional difference between accepted medical knowledge and the real bodily experiences that women have - including those that are never reported in medical textbooks nor admitted as possibilities in the medical world.

In touch there are no language barriers; anything that can walk, fly, creep, crawl, or swim already speaks it. A study of home births assisted by the midwives of The Farm (Durand 1992) looked at the outcomes of 1,707 women who received care in rural Tennessee between 1971 and 1989. When you pair a doula with a midwife, you create a wonderful support team to aid in a fear-free labor and birth experience. Her mother, Ruth Stinson Middleton, was a home economics teacher, who taught in various small towns within a forty-mile radius of Marshalltown, Iowa.Positive stories shared by women who have had wonderful childbirth experiences are an irreplaceable way to transmit knowledge of a woman's true capacities in pregnancy and birth. O MY GOSH you have to read this book if you are going to or have given birth at home or just want to have a wide awake natural childbirth! In fact, for someone who was already of the mind that birth should be woman-centered and fear-free, this book increased my guilt about the fact that I hated being pregnant--I was sick the entire time. My midwife partners and I at the The Farm learned by observation and experience that the presence of even one person who is not exquisitely attuned to the mother's feelings can stop some women's labors. And the last section was more technical than the information I'm looking for about birth - geared toward learning and practicing midwives.