Giving Birth With Confidence

The story of farmers’ trust in the natural process of birth, and respect for their animals as they give birth, gave rise to lots of comments. This one surprised me: “But animals are not nearly as important as babies. Each baby is precious.” Unless you’ve been around farms and farmers you wouldn’t know just how [...]

I spend a lot of time in rural Ireland. My husband and I have an old farmhouse and lots of wonderful neighbors who visit whenever the spirit moves them. Our little farmhouse is strangely busier than our home in New York City! When we were there in February our farmer friend Pat McCarthy dropped in [...]

The Sunday Times magazine carried a little piece a couple of weeks ago by Tina Cassidy that mirrors the beliefs of a lot of modern women about having labor induced – one from a Steelers spouse who didn’t want her birth to interfere with a big NFL game. “Once her obstetrician determined that the [induction] [...]

A friend of mine who’s doing graduate nursing studies shared information with some of us recently about birth rituals in Tibet. OK, Tibet is thousands of miles from New York City and Los Angeles; and culturally it’s a million miles away from you and me. But I love what she wrote about the Tibetan struggle [...]

The recent New York Times article about Indiana legislators and their prosecution of midwives who assist at home births takes me back to the early ‘70s in northern California where a midwife was charged with murder in the loss of a baby born at home. She’d called the hospital for the young couple (who were [...]