Giving Birth With Confidence

A private philanthropic organization in California that studies brain science sets up a little alarm for pregnant folks who load their baby’s ultrasound picture onto their iPhone to zip around to friends and family. The DANA Foundation alerts us to new research cautioning the rampant use of what so many folks must assume is a [...]

A doula friend of mine was telling me recently about the seemingly arbitrary variation she sees across the different hospitals where she attends births. “In one hospital they always turn the epidural off when the woman is ready to push, and in another hospital just a few miles away we had to fight to get [...]

I never got the full details of why my mother spent two weeks on her back in the hospital after she birthed me, her third baby. I do know that 29 years later I was encouraged to stay on my back during the marathon labor of my first birth in a then-state-of-the-art California in-hospital birth [...]

NY Times writer Sandeep Jauhar’s recent piece in the New York Times is chocked with some great observations. He’s a cardiologist, but his wisdom is sorely needed in the hospital birth setting.
Perhaps most telling is this: “…diagnostic intuition is becoming rare in the current era of technological medicine.” The electronic fetal monitor that gets unquestioningly [...]

Here’s a blog from Dublin that is worth a read. Likely many of us can relate to this mother’s tale of being a part of a drama that need not have played out the way it did. Even though her birth was of the “all’s well that ends well” variety, it would not be filed [...]