Ina May's Guide to Childbirth: Updated With New Material

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This is the second time that I've read through Spiritual Midwifery, and I enjoyed it just as much this time around.

Ina May Gaskin has been a longtime teacher of midwifery and is the author of ‘Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth,’‘Spiritual Midwifery,’ and ‘Birth Matters,’ among other titles. My husband and a pregnant and beaming I, were attending a very moving Greek/Kiwi wedding on Waiheke Island and we met a radiant couple who taught Yoga among other esteemed things. Obviously if a woman feels cared for and relaxed and at ease, anything, including childbirth would be easier to get through. While the book did not convince me to have a home birth, it did reinforce my intuition that the female body is made for birthing and that the focus of childbirth should be to support the body in doing what it normally does on the bodies' time table and in a way that works for that particular mother, rather than trying to hasten events with multiple medical interventions that carry with them side effects that may prolong labor and endanger the mother or child.

I was able to get past the sort of hippie-go-lucky language and tone of the book to the meat of it--namely, that childbirth is a wonderful natural process that can go much better for the mother when she is surrounded by supportive individuals who are acting on her behalf and the baby's in a personal way rather than in a institutional, impersonal, intervention focused hospital. It's the first hand account - told by the mothers and fathers and midwives - of about 200 of the 372 births (thus far) on a giant culty hippie baby making farm in Tennessee.

If you're looking for open, positive, and detailed stories about births, this is a great book to have.

The state of relaxation of the mouth and jaw is directly correlated to the ability of the cervix, the vagina, and the anus to open to full capacity.

This makes this book is fucking cool no matter who you are--someone interested in a very interesting cultural moment, an expectant parent, or someone (like me) who wants to take babies out of ladies for a living. Switching to a hands and knees position causes the shape of the pelvis to change, thereby allowing the trapped shoulder to free itself and the baby to be born. She makes a lot of pronouncements such as: We have a very low incidence of post partum depression here on the Farm.And as a woman-centered story of Vietnam-era counter-culture, I suspect I could enjoy this book immensely. She is recognized as an authority on mother-led birth who caters to what the mother needs to have a positive and healthy birth. It left me with the confident knowledge that I wasn't the first, I won't be the last, and birth first and foremost belongs to women, not doctors. Considered a seminal work, it presented pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding from a fresh, natural and spiritual perspective, rather than the standard clinical viewpoint.