Your book bag is empty.
Birth Matters: A Midwife's Manifesta
£9.99
Upbeat and informative, Gaskin asserts that the way in which women become mothers is a women's rights issue, and it is perhaps the act that most powerfully exhibits what it is to be instinctually human. Birth Matters is a spirited manifesta showing us how to trust women, value birth, and reconcile modern life with a process as old as our species. Renowned for her practice's exemplary results and low intervention rates, Ina May Gaskin has gained international notoriety for promoting natural birth. She is a much-beloved leader of a movement that seeks to stop the hyper-medicalization of birth-which has lead to nearly a third of hospital births in America to be cesarean sections-and renew confidence in a woman's natural ability to birth.
Current Stock:
ISBN:
9781905177585
Shipping Cost:
Calculated at Checkout
Author:
Details:
2011 | paperback | 266pp | 210x138mm
Delivery:
Orders over £20 are dispatched FREE to UK addresses the same or next working day (more info)
For FREE international delivery we recommend:
Reviews Hide Reviews
A thought provoking, amazing book
Wow what a great read, Ina May Gaskin is an absolute inspiration. Her passion and determination for change comes across in every single word that she writes, her style of writing is engaging and makes the book an easy read. You end up desperate to read more and find out more. She shares a lot of her own personal history and shares the knowledge that she has obviously worked so hard to gain on such a broad subject. The sections about how countries all around the world manage pregnancy, labour and birth are so full of facts and true stories that they really stir your own emotions and make you wish that things would change for the better.<p>The birth stories scattered throughout are fantastic, a real inspiration and a wonderful confirmation of what a womans body can do given the opportunity and no medical intervention. <p>It is so sad to think of all of the knowledge that has been gained for as long as man has been around being lost and negated in such a way. Women should be safer than every now giving birth however with more medical interventions more women in the USA will die in childbirth now than in their own mothers era. It really is going the wrong way, so much is now down to politics and money that the most natural process on Earth is being ruined and altered. <p>This book really initiates conversations and I have personally found myself discussing it with friends and family on many occasions _ so much so that they now want to read the book. I would highly recommend this book to anyone in the health profession, any mums or mums to be or anyone with an interest in childbirth, it is an extremely thought provoking piece from a fantastic author.
Fascinating
I am new to Ina May and am completely hooked, what a wonderful woman, and what an amazing insight in to the varied world of childbirth I really have learnt a lot from this and world recommend it to any birth geeks, moms to be. It makes you examine social changes you may not even of noticed have happened. I am embarking on the journey into preparation for my second birth and am grateful to have even more information to make the right choices for me, am also very grateful to be in the UK the things that still happen in antenatal and post natal care in the USA shocked me.
Vital reading for anyone concerned with birth
Birth Matters' is one of the most wide-ranging books on birth that I have ever read. It is shocking, but inspiring. The way birth is managed in different nations and cultures today is compared to the way it was approached in the past - how shocking that a woman who gives birth in the U.S today is more likely to die in childbirth than her mother was. <p>Other aspects of the life of women today are examined; the development of feminism through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, medical menstrual suppression and other manipulations of the natural hormonal state, the obsession with breast enlargement surgery, as well as the unbelievable fact that women in America still die for the lack of post natal care, whilst others are imprisoned for the 'crime' of being young, not knowing they were pregnant and failing to resuscitate their babies. <p>Birth Matters' considers the global, international, national, regional and personal aspects of childbirth. Especially engaging for parents-to-be are the personal accounts of births scattered throughout the book, and the chapter for fathers-to-be. This is all rounded up with Gaskin's vision for the future of birth.<p>This has to be one of the most important and comprehensive contributions concerning the future of our society to emerge in recent years.
Inspiring!
Ina May Gaskin is an inspiring writer on the subject of childbirth and midwifery. I have read a couple of her other books before this one and have found they are full of lots of new information about childbirth and are written in a way that is easy to read. This book is no different and I found myself jotting down a few ideas and tips about childbirth. This book is written with a focus on midwifery - from the history to present day to the setting out a manifesta for the future. Although interesting in parts, I did find myself skipping some of the sections which were very dominated by the current situation in USA. The birth stories which feature throughout the book and the chapter which is written for fathers-to-be were particularly interesting and inspiring.
A scientific celebration of what women are capable of achieving
Ina May's new book is a manifesta setting out the philosophy of natural birth, and therefore nothing that has not been said by wise women (and men) countless times before. The value of this work is its comprehensive, detailed, and clear presentation of the information, such that surely no rational human could disagree. It is a scientific celebration of what nature has achieved and what women are capable of. The first chapters set the subject in its global context, and birth stories are scattered through the text to remind the reader that while these are global, political issues, they have personal, individual impacts. I have learned about the cultural loss of breastfeeding knowledge, and it makes a sad kind of sense to me to be reading the same description of society's attitude to birth: the loss of skills among health professionals and the consequent loss of positive birth stories. This cycle will be perpetuated and added to, and will spread beyond the US increasingly rapidly, as we lose touch with and confidence in our own bodies. Ina May Gaskin discusses the role of feminism in driving an escape' from pregnancy and motherhood, a push towards equality between men and women instead of a celebration of the important differences between us. Why should power be measured only in masculine terms and defined by the choice NOT to do something? Ina May's positive, empowering feminism offers a far wider range of choices. It seemed crazy to me to take on the belief that the human female is the only mammal on earth that is a mistake of natureƒ it's our minds that sometimes complicate matters for us. (p.23)' She quotes Simone de Beauvoir describing the pregnant women as inciting fear in children and contempt in young people, ensnared: ñlife's passive instrument.î De Beauvoir, the great feminist intellectual, writes as though she believes what men have said for centuries about women's bodies: that we are disgusting, inefficient, and inferior to men (who cannot, normally, grow or feed babies); and seems unaware that historically speaking, medical men who profit from managing birth have had personal and financial interests in telling women that it is a dangerous and painful process, that requires the presence of a qualified doctor. Again the parallels with the unethical practices of formula manufacturers undermining women's knowledge of and confidence in breastfeeding are clear. Some of the practices resulting from this basic assumption of women's inferiority and ignorance are barbaric, and many persist in 21st Century western healthcare. The book describes a bleak outlook for maternity care and motherhood in a world where politics and economics are everything. Yet the short-termism of the idea that labouring women must be cured or rescued from themselves costs far more in terms of money, life, and quality of life. How can this be an acceptable situation? I was struck by the anecdote in which a couple kissed to raise oxytocin levels and aid relaxation and the progress of labour. It helped me to think about the way I talk to antenatal groups about the role of oxytocin in breastfeeding. And also of the way the idea of sex to bring on labour has been reduced to the role of prostaglandin, when everything about it promotes skin contact, eye contact, and a feeling of well-being. In this, I find yet another example of the big picture being reduced to one male-orientated detail. I was aware that birth in the US was highly medicalised, but the details and the implications of that, as clearly laid out by Ina May Gaskin, are horrifying and depressing. At the same time, the positive birth stories are affirming, empowering tales, a contrasting picture of the good that is possible when women are informed and respected.
As excellent as expected!
I am a first year student midwife, and having read two of Ina May Gaskin's previous books, I was eagerly awaiting my copy of Birth Matters. I was not disappointed! The book is very informative and evidence-based yet easy to read. Midwives, parents-to-be, or anyone with an interest in childbirth will find this book fascinating. The author writes mainly from an american perspective, yet all nationalities and cultures would benefit from her wisdom, experience and insight. The book covers the history of childbirth and midwifery, feminism, the use of technology in childbirth, caesarean sections, and ends with the author's vision for the future. There is a chapter aimed at fathers-to-be and the book is interspersed with birth stories. Highly recommended!
