Giving Birth With Confidence

My email this week brought a beautiful, uplifting, happy treat.  Lorri Walker, founder and director of South Coast Midwifery, forwarded a ” modern account of today’s natural childbirth.”  Told by 10 mothers, the short film chronicles their journeys to challenge the conventional hospital birth model to give birth in their own way. Check out Natural Born Babies: A [...]

Often, the closer I look at a study, the less confident I become about the results. I’ve learned that you can’t always trust a paper’s title or abstract, and media coverage of new studies can be woefully misleading, even when it is not carefully orchestrated by those with a vested interest (which it often is). [...]

The recent New York magazine story, Extreme Birth, enraged me.  The very top of the front cover of the magazine entices readers to look inside with this, Plus: The High Priestess of Home Birth.  The tag-line to the piece is “the fearless–some say too fearless–leader of the home birth movement”. The tone is set. Andrew Goldman’s article is [...]

Wall Street Journal writer Keith Winstein announced the New England Journal of Medicine findings that early C-sections carry some mighty risks to the newborn, “even when the baby has technically reached full term” according to a large, new study. What has grown into a widely popular practice (with obstetricians claiming that many mothers request surgical [...]

All of us know someone with asthma.  The airways in the lungs spasm and swell, the oxygen supply gets restricted — it’s miserable stuff. The incidence of asthma has steadily risen here in the US over the past couple of decades, right along with the rate of surgical birth. Times writer Tara Parker-Pope writes about [...]