Again, modern medicine’s ability to dull that pain is an incredible achievement that has aided many women who have had difficult, complicated labors, but I don’t think that these methods should be turned to simply because of a dislike of pain. Drawing upon her thirty-plus years of experience, Ina May Gaskin, the nation's leading midwife, shares the benefits and joys of natural childbirth by showing women how to trust in the ancient wisdom of their bodies for a healthy and fulfilling birthing experience. I realized that I was truly blessed, that there really were some things on which technology could not improve--one of those was the billion-year-old evolutionary process of human childbirth. My challenging but beautiful birth experience has apparently become an exception in this country-- but it doesn't have to be. Books by doctors that warn midwives are ill qualified and you will die at home or by using any alternative methods of coping with this life experience.

Ina may gaskin is one of the best midwives to listen to if you are looking for material that will help you have an empowering birth experience.

Our culture really does make a medicalized birth seem normal, when in reality, the opposite is true.

Ina May made me terrified of mainstream medicine's approach to birth, and the book got hard to read at a certain point because I was like, "Yeah, sure, this birth would be wonderful if I were doing it on Ina May's hippie commune, but since I'm doing it in a shitty Miami hospital those doctors are going to cut me up into pieces and mess up my baby with all kinds of unnecessary and frightening interventions. When my turn came around, I still felt woefully unprepared and not a little bit terrified of childbirth. Her promotion of a low-intervention but extremely effective method for dealing with one of the most-feared birth complications, shoulder dystocia, has resulted in that method being adopted by a growing number of practitioners. When I asked to not have an episiotomy, he skirted the issue entirely by asking me what kind of episiotomy I meant, never once saying whether he would or would not give me one. Motherhood is Not a Competition: Why Pressure Moms to Strive for the "Perfect" Natural Childbirth (and make them feel guilty if that isn't in the cards)?For a nerd as myself, I really enjoyed her insight and you cannot help to be incredibly impressed by the track record for Ina May as a midwife. This very lengthy review might suggest that I didn't like this book or that I majorly disagreed with the author. There is enough material to wade through as a mom-to-be and precious little time to waste on a topic like this. The days and weeks following my son's birth should have been the happiest of my life (well, barring the hormones rocking my boat, of course), but instead I had to spend the first year of my baby's life wrestling with guilt and shame and a sense of inadequacy, and that's just stupid.

While a lot of her outrage seemed justified to me, it wasn't very helpful in a book that was supposed to be a "guide" to childbirth. If the natural childbirth books hadn't made me so insanely fearful of what labor in the hospital would be like, I would've gone in earlier and probably wound up taking drugs, which I really didn't want to do. Ina May's Guide to Childbirth is skewed toward natural childbirth and can get a little culty, especially all the stories about The Farm, but I found the information in the second part of the book really helpful even when planning for a hospital birth. She quells a lot of anxieties women may have about how they are going to birth a baby out of such a small space (not an uncommon concern)… Even if you don’t read the book, it’s at least worth looking into her idea of Sphincter Law and how this affects the laboring process.

That said, the book did a pretty good job of convincing me that the mother's mental approach to childbirthing and expectations for the experience are the single most important indicator of how it will all go. This book is one of the most frequently recommended resources I’ve seen mentioned to mothers who are considering a natural childbirth. The second day, I made up a drinking game -- drink every time there's a picture of a guy with a big 70s mustache.

Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall).The best way I know to counter the effects of frightening stories is to hear or read empowering ones.