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Nutrition in pregnancy—a no-brainer, right? Who would think it was so controversial? Disagreement over a healthy diet during pregnancy continues to rage, with one side saying that what a woman eats will have no effect on her pregnancy and the other saying it has an enormous impact. So what’s a woman to eat? Read more…. Preventing Complications with Nutrition
I find it fascinating that women are afraid of the wrong thing when it comes to birth. They are afraid of birth when it is what they are perfectly designed to do. The thing they should be afraid of is whom they put their trust in and where they birth. Read more…. Misplaced Fear
Photo by Hal Gatewood
Without adequate testing of Cytotec (misoprostol) for labor induction, obstetricians simply began to use it on their birthing women. They were taking advantage of a huge loophole in our drug regulatory system. Read more…. Cytotec Induction and Off-Label Use
Photo by Tianshu Liu
Sixteen hundred births over 31 years without losing a mother or baby—that’s an impressive statistic for any birth practitioner in any country. This was the first thing that Kiyoko Inoue, a Japanese midwife who will celebrate her 80th birthday next year, proudly told me in a recent interview in Japan. She was nervous about talking with me until she realized I speak Japanese and understand midwifery; then she was a fountain of knowledge and stories.
Photo by Caroline Brown
I based the title of my article on the title of a highly influential Ladies Home Journal article from the 1950s. It began in the November, 1957 issue with a letter to the editor from a labor and delivery nurse who gave some examples of abusive treatment of laboring women where she worked. The editors published the letter, saying that they had never heard of such mistreatment, and invited readers to respond. The result was “Cruelty in the Maternity Wards,” an outpouring that Ladies Home Journal published as an article in the May issue the following year.
Photo by Jordan Whitt
Women who choose to include a doula in their birth plans are generally planning a hospital birth. In my doula practice, I frequently hear clients say that they want their birth “to feel like a homebirth” as much as possible in a hospital setting. As I work with these women prenatally I try to learn more specifically what this means to them.
When I was a beginning midwife thirty-some years ago, U. S. women were just beginning to recognize that they could make choices in how they gave birth. Their mothers had mostly assumed that they had to do whatever their doctors said with no loved ones nearby, even when that meant submitting to mandatory forceps deliveries, routine pubic shaves, enemas and large episiotomies. Midwives were not available to more than 99 percent of women then, and few women knew that midwives could be a possible option.
When I see one of my Lotus birth babies gingerly holding her cord, I feel the goodness of leaving them intact. Her cord, his placenta, the baby’s companion in the womb, who has sustained mother and child through pregnancy, has shared the baby’s magical prenatal world.
This whole movement toward unassisted birth should shake us midwives up! I hate to say this because I am a midwife, but we have done as much as docs and hospitals to scare women about birth and to frighten them out of trusting their bodies.
Read more…. What The Unassisted Birth Movement Teaches Midwives
Photo by 东旭 王
Kathleen Johnson is a registered nurse, childbirth, lactation and infant massage educator. She has attended home, birth center and hospital births and currently works part-time in a hospital birth center and part-time in her private holistic nursing/healing touch practice. Kathleen is completing her master’s thesis on “The Experience of Spirituality in Pregnancy” and welcomes stories from mothers and their attendants about their own spiritual experiences during pregnancy and birth. Visit her Web site at www.spiritbirth.org.
Photo by Patti Ramos
Birth is inherently a female activity. The choice, the ability, the power to give birth is innately female. Historically women were the sole possessors of birthing knowledge and technique, and in certain cultures and time periods men feared them as a result of this.
Photo by Marilyn Nolt
When I first became interested in midwifery, I was pregnant with my fourth child. I came from a hospital background not only in my birthing style, but also in my chosen field of work.
