Giving Birth With Confidence

I had a wonderful chat with a young labor and delivery nurse last week. I gave her a signed copy of our book several months ago when she attended a childbirth educator seminar. She called to say she had finally read the book and how much she had enjoyed it. What she said next startled me, but [...]

A recent New York Times article on heart stents, the tiny metal sleeves doctors began placing in arteries in the early 1990s to keep blood flowing, says a lot. Stents have become a very popular fix for clogged arteries here in the US, and a big business for those who make them and the [...]

Childbirth Connection and Lamaze International have just released the results of Listening to Mothers II. This is the report of the second national U.S. survey of women’s childbearing experiences. The research was done by Childbirth Connection with Lamaze International and was conducted by Harris Interactive. More than 1300 women between the ages of 18 and 44 [...]

Language is such a powerful thing (and that statement alone is verbally weak and still makes a strong statement). I’m realizing some of that “power of the word” in these weeks that I’m living in Belgium with my husband. Talk about being lifted out of one’s comfort zone – spend an hour at a café [...]

I was looking for something else in the airport when my eye caught the lead headline on the cover of this week’s New Yorker: A better way to be born? I bought the magazine and raced through airport security. The article, Score:How childbirth went industrial  is written by Atul Gawande. Dr. Gawande is a surgeon, an assistant professor [...]