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

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As the occurrence of vaginal breech births has declined over the last 25 years, the knowledge and skill required for such births have come close to extinction. However, Ina May Gaskin believes giving birth without fear can make the entire experience of labor and birth a more positive one. Obviously if a woman feels cared for and relaxed and at ease, anything, including childbirth would be easier to get through. The birth stories are incredibly touching, even to someone who doesn't have children and has no intention of getting pregnant any time soon. It's the first hand account - told by the mothers and fathers and midwives - of about 200 of the 372 births (thus far) on a giant culty hippie baby making farm in Tennessee.

She has appeared in films as Orgasmic Birth: The Best-Kept Secret (2009) (directed by Debra Pascali-Bonaro) and The Business of Being Born (2008) (directed by Abby Epstein and produced by Ricki Lake). 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.Only rarely do doctors in training have the opportunity to sit continuously with laboring women for hours. Her mother, Ruth Stinson Middleton, was a home economics teacher, who taught in various small towns within a forty-mile radius of Marshalltown, Iowa. 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. My purpose for reading this book is to brush up on childbirth and strategies to support my partner during her pregnancy and labor. Having given birth once, I straight up don't believe another gal who says she didn't feel any pain and was thrilled to have 30 people watching.

In the 1960s, Ina May gave birth to her first child in which the physician used obstetrical forceps.While the book did not convince me to have a home birth, it did reinforce my intuition that the female body is made for birthing and that the focus of childbirth should be to support the body in doing what it normally does on the bodies' time table and in a way that works for that particular mother, rather than trying to hasten events with multiple medical interventions that carry with them side effects that may prolong labor and endanger the mother or child. Mainly, the themes being to make the mother comfortable in a number of different ways, the importance of the father (or partner, in my case) and what he can bring to the birth experience, and that childbirth is natural, powerful and not always the horror story we see on tv.

In 1997, she received the ASPO/Lamaze Irwin Chabon Award and the Tennessee Perinatal Association Recognition Award.In my son's birth, medical intervention was necessary, but Ina May implies that when this happens, it is the parent's fault for not letting go of their fear (I forget which birth story, but there is a particular one where she comments after the parents's narrative that their fear was what caused some difficulty--condescending much? The fear and anxiety that the anticipation of pain that childbirth can bring often makes the last weeks of pregnancy, as well as the birth itself, a negative experience for many women. Founded in 1971, by 1996, the Farm Midwifery Center had handled more than 2200 births, with remarkably good outcomes.

And the last section was more technical than the information I'm looking for about birth - geared toward learning and practicing midwives.This book was autobiographical on how "The Farm" came to be, how and why Ina May ended up in a midwifery role, and the things she and her midwifery partners learned along the way.