Since I've been perusing scads of parenting books online lately, I thought I would share another one that I found to be wonderful to read and super helpful.
Ina May's Guide to ChildbirthIna May Gaskin
There are a few books that I have read on this whole mommyhood adventure that I would deem indispensable. This is one that a wonderful friend of mine gave me pre-baby. It was by far the best book I read on labor and delivery.
Pre-pregnancy my main source of knowledge about labor and delivery had been sitcoms and horror stories- both of which will scare you to death about how horrible childbirth is. They make it out to be this awful, unnatural, barely-survivable experience. So, once it dawned on me that I being pregnant meant that this was going to be an unavoidable event, I was terrified.
This book was amazing.
It is written by a midwife and so obviously makes the argument for natural childbirth. But it does so in a way that makes you excited about going through labor- not paralyzed with fear about all of the possible complications or the side-effects and dangers of medical interventions. Her take is that giving birth is a completely natural, normal and wonderful thing. Women have been doing it for as long as there have been women. So labor is not a medical ailment that needs to be treated, it is a natural process that our bodies are designed to do! She does talk about the dangers of some of the current medical practices- c-sections, induced labor, epidurals, etc- but doesn't dwell on them in the scary way that some books do. I am not sure I totally believe her chapter on "orgasmic labor", but my experience with natural childbirth was completely wonderful (yes, of course, painful at points, but overall totally doable). I would do it again! (And probably will someday)
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