Giving Birth With Confidence

This is old news, but I can’t stop thinking about it. A woman in Maryland was ‘fired’ by her doctor in her eighth month of pregnancy. The pregnant woman wanted to have a vaginal birth after having had a previous cesarean, and she did not want routine electronic fetal monitoring. The Our Bodies Ourselves’ blog [...]

The Los Angeles Times published an op ed piece this week by Jennifer Block, the author of Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care. Block highlights the connection between the rising maternal mortality rate in the US and the C-section epidemic. Her evidence based conclusion is that “more women are dying in childbirth [...]

Good news. Lamaze has just posted its wonderful “Six Care Practices that Support Normal Birth” – papers that examine the benefits and risks of how birth is done these days. It’s elementary stuff about labor and giving birth and the moments after birth that so many hospitals ignore in the face of solid research. It’s [...]

OK, I’ll admit it: I owned a toy nurse’s kit when I was a little girl and declared that I wanted to be a nurse when I grew up, (just like my mom was). I thought that kit was the coolest collection of stuff. Even though the grown-up me shys away from a doctor’s office [...]

When the “what’s wrong with cesarean birth” question pops up in casual conversation, it’s hard for some of us to not go ballistic. Judy and I get exercised about the fear-inducing pages of today’s best-selling childbirth books because we know that women’s confidence gets chipped away by page after page of descriptions about what might [...]