Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #436816 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Anyone who has taken a prenatal education class in the last decade can detail much of what Boston Globe reporter Cassidy documents about birthing battles in her enjoyable new book. What she so cogently adds is a history of Western practices and attitudes surrounding birth, from the "God-sibs" (or "gossips") who sat by a woman's bed in Europe and early America to the scheduled cesarean of today. The book is well written and will be an important eye-opener to many. Cassidy works hard to remain neutral, but a preference for the discourse of "natural" birth creeps in. She looks nostalgically back at times when most women gave birth at home with female midwives in attendance. This leads to some problematic moments, as when she wants to argue that, historically, birth was not the danger to women's lives that many today assume. But then she has to admit that pioneer women wrote their wills before giving birth and that most women who die in childbirth today are in the non-Western world, where they lack access to hospitals. This is, by Cassidy's admission, the work of a woman disappointed by her own birthing experience. But that, too, is a product of our time—the idea that we "deserve" a certain experience as we give birth. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Blame it on the pelvis. The awkward shape and size of that bony structure makes childbirth both difficult and dangerous. As a result, humans are the only mammals who need help to deliver their children, notes Tina Cassidy in Birth. Other animals have a straight shot through the birth canal, but our babies have to twist and turn to get out of that darn pelvis -- or, as I came to imagine it during my own pregnancy, to squeeze themselves like a basketball through a Pringles can.

But infrastructure is only the first problem. Human interference can make things much worse. In this breezy popular history, Cassidy, a former Boston Globe reporter and editor, surveys centuries of terrible childbirths around the world, attended by doctors, nurses and midwives with strange theories and, in more than a few cases, deeply sadistic streaks. Tirelessly wide-eyed, Cassidy details how laboring women have been strapped down and shackled, drugged into oblivion and ripped open with a macabre array of tools more suited to taxidermy than obstetrics. It's amazing anyone got out of the womb alive.

Childbirth fads and customs in Western cultures swing from one extreme to another and back again, Cassidy writes. First there were midwives, who were then replaced by doctors, recently unseated by a returning vogue for midwives. For centuries, babies were born at home, then women opted for hospitals; now, those hospitals are trying to make their delivery wards more "homey." Mothers breastfed for thousands of years, then they were told that formula was better. Now it's back to nursing. Painkillers are in, then they're out. And so it goes, literally ad nauseam.

It's not surprising that childbirth would be the focus of such ambivalence and anxiety. Throughout history, the making of children has been at once a low-odds proposition and a high-stakes affair -- not the joyful experience it is advertised as today but a matter of dowries, alliances and staffing up the farm. Maternal and neonatal death rates ran high at all levels of society. In male-dominated cultures, the fact that women were solely responsible for gestation and delivery must have been an affront. No wonder, then, that the attending women were eventually supplanted by male doctors.

Those doctors -- as early as the 16th century in Europe -- had startlingly little training and a severe distrust of the more experienced midwives. They were taught on makeshift mannequins and many hadn't even seen a live birth before they began to perform deliveries -- sometimes with their hands covered by a sheet, too embarrassed (or concerned for their patients' modesty) to look directly at the body parts they were working on.

Then came the hospitals. Cassidy points out that, for most of human history, the majority of women have given birth in or around their homes. Those who first delivered at American hospitals, starting in the 18th century, may have been at far greater risk of injury and death than their mothers. Doctors regularly moved from autopsies to live patients without ensuring sterile conditions -- or even washing their hands. They didn't know they had to. Some blamed the women themselves for the resulting infections, citing tight petticoats, loose morals and anxious "fretting" as causes. Even after germ theory became generally known, infant deaths from birth injuries in the United States jumped a shocking 50 percent between 1915 and 1929, Cassidy writes, because more women were giving birth in overcrowded, vermin-infested hospitals, where hand-washing still wasn't standard procedure and staff engaged in "aggressive" obstetrics that amounted to brutally wrenching the child out of its mother.

In contrast, women today seek out the best "birth experience," whether it's the "give me the epidural in the hospital parking lot" approach or multi-week Lamaze classes. But these so-called choices mask a less certain reality. Childbirth is unpredictable, and the best-laid birth plans are no guarantee. We are still ambivalent about this business, decrying the medicalization of childbirth but embracing its ability to get that newborn out safely if we hit a rough patch.

Cassidy has put together a concise survey, with more breadth than depth. Some of the material won't be all that surprising to anyone who has prepared for childbirth or at least paged through What To Expect When You're Expecting. But there's plenty of new gore for those who want it.

Oh, and there's more about that pelvis: It makes things hard in the months after birth, too. Over millennia, as human forebears got smarter and their brains grew larger, evolution found a balance: Since the pelvic opening can't grow any wider and still allow us to walk on two legs, babies' heads can't grow any bigger. This is why, Cassidy writes, our infants are born "altricial": With their brains still developing, they are helpless and in need of extended parental care. A shivering newborn calf can stumble to its feet within an hour after birth, but a human doesn't walk for about a year. Anatomy is destiny, in this case: Even after they make it through childbirth, parents are in for a long -- and bumpy -- ride.

Reviewed by Sara Sklaroff
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Required reading for new mothers
So many of my friends were pushed into birth experiences that were not what they expected by not knowing what to expect when you get to the hospital, and why things are the way they are right now in the US. The truth is that it IS possible to have a positive childbirth experience, you just have to work to get it. Don't expect the hospital or doctors to look out for you, as they are working for the benefit of the hospital and not you. Read this book, get informed, find out what you want, and find practitioners in your area that agree with you.

Read for entertainment, not information
After hearing the birth stories of her mother and grandmother and after her own emergency C-section, Tina Cassidy starts contemplating the history of childbearing methods, starting with why it's so much harder for us to bear children than for a rhesus monkey (biped and big brain). She then examines midwives, where we give birth, doctors, pain relief, C-sections, forceps and other tools, and the role of the father.

Some of this book is truely squirm-inducing. She describes the horrific ways women have been forced to give birth-whether that's quietly and all alone in a barn or being strapped to a table and given drugs to lead to amnesia. She details the evolution of C-section techniques. Perhaps most disurbingly, she describes each of the ways a stillborn (or a baby though to be stillborn or stuck in the birth canal) have been removed in hopes of saving the mother's life. However, the only section I had to just skip a page on was her description of how placentas have been served. Because she is a journalist, Cassidy does tend to harp on the sensational, the big stories, and the odd cases.

This is an entertaining read, but it should not be used as an authoritiative source on the history of childbirth-this is intended to be entertaining, not source material. She plays fast an loose with statistics to serve her needs-for instance, to prove her point about maternal death rates, she examines the records kept by a doctor in a town a couple hundred years ago and compares it to well-kept, maticulously documented government reports for entire countries. She also seems to equate the phrase "research shows" or "research suggests" with "the research I did on Lexus (or JSTOR or whatever) shows that someone wrote a newspaper about this-I have no idea what RESEARCHERS have found about this." The most infuriating case of this is her twice mentioned connection between Pitocin and autism. My son's birth was induced by Pitocin and he does have autism, so I was quickly drawn to this and immediatly checked her source to see how strong a correlation there was. Her source was a newspaper report. This is all the reporter says about it: "Over the years, a host of other environmental factors have also been nominated as culprits, including a variety of infections, like German measles in pregnant mothers; the sedative drug thalidomide; the drug Pitocin, used to induce labor; synthetic compounds like plastics and PCB's; and food additives." That's it. Nothing from the CDC, no reports cited, nothing. I bring up these two examples not to discourage people from reading this book; it's an interesting read. But don't believe everything you read in here. If something sounds too incredible to be true, it might be. Check it out for yourself. (But then, that's always good advice.)

This book is wonderful!
The beginning drew me in right away! Some of the facts that Tina Cassidy had discovered, I was surprised about!