Top 6 Books of 2011 | International Planned Parenthood Federation/Western Hemisphere Region". Archived from the original on 2018-04-18 . Retrieved 2018-04-17. In 2013, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. [3] Bibliography [ edit ] Books [ edit ] Gaskin was born to an Iowa Protestant family ( Methodist on one side, Presbyterian on the other). Her father, Talford Middleton, was raised on a large Iowa farm, which was lost to a bank not long after his father's accidental death in 1926. Her mother, Ruth Stinson Middleton, was a home economics teacher, who taught in various small towns within a forty-mile radius of Marshalltown, Iowa. Both parents were college graduates, who placed great importance on higher education. Not only was I ill prepared for the way my birth happened, but I was also ill prepared for the aftermath. I completely believed that giving birth vaginally was the absolute best and safest way to go. Well again, not so much in my case. I've spent the last six months in physical therapy trying to undo the damage done to my pelvic floor by all the prolonged pushing and use of forceps. I hope to avoid surgery, but I've since come to learn that depending on the study, eleven to nineteen percent of women will undergo pelvic floor surgery at some point in their life. Two of the major risk factors are prolonged second stage of labor and the use of forceps. Just another possible pitfall I had no awareness of before giving birth. I have so many conflicting thoughts about this book. This is the fourth book that I've read about childbirth. On the one hand, I have found it to be the most helpful in preparing me for childbirth. On the other hand, there is an obvious bias. While I agreed with much of what the author wrote, there were several parts that really bugged me.

It may not be for the squeamish, but if you're going to be popping a baby out of your body one day, it may help to not be too squeamish about these things. I was also impressed by the clarity of the writing. Even though Gaskin is clearly on one side of the childbirth debate, she didn't come off sounding like a crazy. I was able to respect her even when (in a few cases) I didn't agree with her. I felt preached at for the last part of the book. While a lot of her outrage seemed justified to me, it wasn't very helpful in a book that was supposed to be a "guide" to childbirth. Some of the topics she discussed could have been covered much more succinctly. And at times, the author went too far in her criticisms. I thought it was especially unfair to claim that Dr.'s are not critical thinkers (or at least haven't been taught this vital skill in medical school) and that they don't have time to read recent studies. While this is certainly true of some Dr.'s, it is surely not true of most Dr.'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". My second pregnancy was hardly noticeable. It seemed that the baby sort of slipped in and was no problem. The only indications of my pregnancy were that I missed my March and April periods and my clothes were a little tight around my waist. I wasted no time in finding the most "lenient" obstetrician in town. I had no problems with him and found he was very honest with me. He flatly told me he insisted on an I.V. and that the hospital required an internal fetal monitor, although I could sign a legal waiver and not have the monitor. I had resigned myself to this type of birth if necessary but decided to investigate further. I finally obtained a copy of Spiritual Midwifery from a health-food store in Nashville, where I grew up. Several weeks later I wrote to The Farm, and Deborah Flowers responded.

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Lorente, C.W. (1995). Mother of Midwifery: Ina May Gaskin Hopes to Birth a Local Movement of Midwives. Vegetarian Times, Special Women's Health Issue, July 1995.

I just love Ina May. She’s such an important voice in the birth world and reading her work will likely make you feel more at ease and (dare I say) even excited about giving birth. A Summary of Articles Published in English about Misoprostol (Cytotec) for Cervical Ripening or Induction of Labor, 2005-09-05 Retrieved: 2010-01-22. Gaskin, Ina May (2015). Birth Matters: A Midwife's Manifesta. New York: Seven Stories Press. ISBN 9781583229279. I believe that pain during childbirth is something that shouldn’t be attempted to be eliminated out of fear or the belief that you cannot handle it, but we should learn to cope with it, something in Gaskin’s book with which I agree. Again, modern medicine’s ability to dull that pain is an incredible achievement that has aided many women who have had difficult, complicated labors, but I don’t think that these methods should be turned to simply because of a dislike of pain. Books like this exist because women have had a variety of birth experiences, all with their pros and cons that deserve to be heard and taken seriously. The Undervalued Art of Vaginal Breech Birth: a Skill Every Birth Attendant Should Learn in Mothering, July-August, 2004. Retrieved: 2006-08-26.My daughter's birth was amazing. Labor was not painful-- it was too big for that. More like getting hit by a tsunami, over and over. The whole intense experience was deeply invigorating and actually GAVE me the energy I needed to cope with the first couple of difficult weeks with a new baby. I experienced some confusion about "The Farm". A better introduction that explained exactly what the farm was would have been helpful. As it was, it took a me a bit of reading to piece together exactly how the farm worked. And I still imagine people living on buses or in tents like a couple of the stories mentioned. Maybe that's really how "The Farm" functions. Also, some of the women in the birth stories came off as very... different. I found the story about the woman stripping down and physically holding the woman who was in labor particularly odd. Some of the wording in the birth stories threw me off. There were a few mothers who would talk about their babies or body parts dancing. Gaskin, Ina May (2009). Ina May's Guide to Breastfeeding. UK: Pinter & Martin. ISBN 9781905177332. OCLC 768809453. Huge caveat, though: this book removed my fear of childbirth but gave me a new and overwhelming terror of hospitals. I found this to be true of most natural childbirth books (with some exceptions, including my favorite Birthing from Within): the confidence they gave me in my body's ability to give birth came at the cost of a raging fear of hospitals and "non-natural" childbirth. Ina May made me terrified of mainstream medicine's approach to birth, and the book got hard to read at a certain point because I was like, "Yeah, sure, this birth would be wonderful if I were doing it on Ina May's hippie commune, but since I'm doing it in a shitty Miami hospital those doctors are going to cut me up into pieces and mess up my baby with all kinds of unnecessary and frightening interventions. Eek!" I wound up spending a lot of my pregnancy terrified of what would happen to me at the hospital, and convinced that medical professionals would make traumatic what would otherwise be an awesome and beautiful experience.

The author got somewhat political in her writing which made me slightly uncomfortable. After she thoroughly detailed problems within the medical field, she gave suggestions that included more federal regulation and national healthcare. I would have appreciated a broader selection of solutions. The author described all that Dr.'s do to prevent lawsuits but failed to suggest malpractice reform in her list of solutions. There is no other organ quite like the uterus. If men had such an organ, they would brag about it. So should we.” I recommend this book to all expectant mothers-to-be. And to everyone else as well. We need to change the view that childbirth is something dangerous and unnatural, and that the only way for women to survive it is to be heavily medicated and close to an emergency room. In Part 2, Ina May covers a variety of helpful topics including why we see birth pain as something to avoid, advice for birthing at a hospital, different models of maternity care, and necessary and unnecessary interventions that may be offered or encouraged. She quells a lot of anxieties women may have about how they are going to birth a baby out of such a small space (not an uncommon concern)… Even if you don’t read the book, it’s at least worth looking into her idea of Sphincter Law and how this affects the laboring process. It was fascinating and explains the ideal environment for birth. If you’re pregnant, I would recommend skipping her chapter on maternal mortality in the US if you think this may increase your anxiety.

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I don't mean to sound bitter, and have no intention of invalidating all of the lovely birth stories that women share. I think it's awesome that such an important life event goes so well for so many women. I think women should do whatever they can to increase their odds of having a positive birth experience. At the same time, I think it's important to realize that birth is an act of nature, and just as in nature, things can become very chaotic and even destructive. I feel as if I have been humbled by mother nature. I really get that we don't have complete control over this experience of giving birth. People have known this for ages. My first visit with a highly recommended obstetrician in town was pretty unpleasant. The first thing I was told was the temperature in the delivery room could not be adjusted, although the lights could. 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. This bothered me, but I knew this was about as magnanimous as he was going to get, so I let it slide. For the time being, I was getting good prenatal care. I could change later. However, as time went on, I was less and less sure of this doctor. In fact, I grew to distrust him. All along, there were little hints that he and I were in different head spaces. The biggest came during the sixth month of pregnancy, when I was sent a certified letter that made no sense whatsoever, unless one read it do it my way or else. Finally, in the seventh month, the doctor said there could be no Leboyer birth,* after leading me to believe all these months there would be. 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 knew I had to find someone else. Genesis 3:16 (ESV) says “To the woman he said, ‘I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you.’” Considered a seminal work, it presented pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding from a fresh, natural and spiritual perspective, rather than the standard clinical viewpoint. In homebirth and midwifery circles, it made her a household name, and a widely respected teacher and writer." [9]

Solar power pioneer Huang Ming wins 'alternative Nobel' ". BBC News. 29 September 2011 . Retrieved 19 September 2016. Gaskin has been credited with the emergence and popularization of direct-entry midwifery (i.e. not training as a nurse first) in the United States since the early 1970s. Between 1977 and 2000, she published the quarterly magazine Birth Gazette. Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth, her second book about birth and midwifery, was published by Bantam/Dell in 2003. Her books have been published in several languages, including German, Italian, Hungarian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Japanese. 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. The next day I felt so good. I looked at the clear blue November sky and the brown oak leaves left on the trees and basked in the warmth of the sun. I realized that I was truly blessed, that there really were some things on which technology could not improve—one of those was the billion-year-old evolutionary process of human childbirth. To some it may have seemed primitive; to me it was perfect.

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The second half of the book was really helpful with information on what to expect during childbirth, what your options are, and techniques to help you during childbirth. It is heavily biased toward home birth, midwifery, and natural birthing. So take some of the comments with a grain of salt because Ina May is talking from her experience which is outside the hospital and from her experiences on the Farm. I'm not sure what information was updated. When reading you do get a clear idea of how experienced of a midwife Ina May is and you can respect her talent and expertise in her field.