Giving Birth With Confidence

There’s been a great series on public radio lately. “Edge of the Rez” is a collection of stories from the northern Arizona communities that border the Navajo and Hopi reservations.
I found myself particularly interested in the story of Frank and Fena Armao, how together they’ve learned to negotiate the complicated cultural terrain of a [...]

Some good folks invited me over for supper the night after I returned home from being out of the country for a couple of months. “There’ll be a baby or two here to hold, if you need a fix,” my host promised. Really, there is nothing like holding a baby to get one’s bearings back, [...]

A few weeks ago (Oct. 26) I blogged on a report about the use of heart stents, a procedure that has gotten awfully common in treating cardiac problems that might be better treated with drug therapy. The Dec. 13 New York Times reported that the FDA has now held a formal hearing around those stent [...]

I taught a class a few weeks ago to doctoral students in nursing. I was presenting my research on home birth. One of the students shared that she had given birth to her third baby at home…in her car, in her garage, on her way to the hospital. With tears in her eyes, twenty years [...]

A month ago the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) released a new policy statement, “Out of Hospital Birth in the United States”.  Although it is posted on their website it is available only to members. It received very little media attention and that was probably planned.  (You can read Lamaze International’s response to this [...]