Product Description

For more than twenty-five years, Mothering magazine has captured an audience of educated women who appreciate its "we'll inform, you choose" approach to parenting. Having a Baby, Naturally reflects this spirit with straightforward, uncensored information about pregnancy and childbirth, addressing common concerns and questions in a compassionate, nonjudgmental style.

Written by Peggy O'Mara, the longtime publisher, editor, and owner of Mothering magazine, it synthesizes the best theories and safest practices used in natural childbirth, including recommendations from the World Health Organization, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Throughout, O'Mara reinforces her belief that each woman's pregnancy and birth experience is a one-of-a-kind event. She covers such topics as:

• Nutrition, diet, and exercise

• Emotional self-awareness during and after pregnancy

• A trimester-by-trimester guide to what is happening in your body and your child's

• Birth choices -- offering suggestions, not "rules"

• Pain medication alternatives

• Birth locations, from hospitals to home birth

• Relieving morning sickness with natural remedies

• Prenatal testing

• Breastfeeding

• Prematurity and multiple births

• Balancing work and family

• The father's role during pregnancy and beyond

• Difficult subjects, such as birth defects, miscarriages, and postpartum depression, are also treated with sensitivity and candor.

Finally, a book for the thinking woman who believes in her own inherent capacity to make smart, informed decisions about her pregnancy and birth, just as she makes in other areas of her life. Having a Baby, Naturally is a celebration of childbirth and an accurate and objective guide to helping women fortify their spirits, develop trust in their bodies, and make the best possible choices to protect their new baby's health.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18368 in Books
• Published on: 2003-08-05
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

About the Author
Peggy O¹Mara has been the publisher, editor, and owner of Mothering magazine since 1980. A dynamic speaker, she has lectured and conducted workshops on natural family topics in conjunction with organizations such as the Omega Institute, Esalen, La Leche League International, Lamaze International, and Bioneers.

She is the author of Natural Family Living and the editor of Vaccinations: The Issue of Our Times.

Peggy O¹Mara is the mother of four children: Lally, 29; Finnie, 27; Bram, 25; and Nora, 21.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction: In the Beginning

Congratulations! You're pregnant. You are now wondering how to create the best possible environment for you and your baby, and the environment that you have the most control over is your mental one. It is important that you have a good inner opinion of yourself during pregnancy. Rest assured that your body is already equipped for the challenges of pregnancy and birth. You can educate your mind, develop trust in your body, and fortify your spirit with accurate and objective information. And you can trust yourself to act in your own best interests and in the best interests of your child.

With pregnancy, you may be surprised to find how deeply your choices have been influenced by the beliefs, attitudes, and customs of society, by the opinions of family members, and by your general lack of exposure to birth. Unless you have witnessed them, pregnancy and birth can seem strange and frightening when in fact they are simple and natural. Several factors contribute to our collective belief that pregnancy and birth are complicated. The overmedicalization of childbirth in the United States, the human tendency to be intimidated by custom and authority, and the fact that insurance companies often only cover hospital birth make real choices in childbirth difficult if not impossible.

In 1982 psychiatrist Ronald Laing wrote, "We do not see childbirth in many obstetric units now. What we see resembles childbirth as much as artificial insemination resembles sexual intercourse. And, birth, as a home and family event, has virtually been cultured out." Laing believed this change was a matter of power. "Women are allowed or not to have their babies at home. In hospital, they are allowed or not to move, scream or sing, stand, walk, sit or squat. Women are allowed or not to have their babies after birth....To allow is to exercise as much, if not more power, than to forbid." Laing pleaded for genuine choice, asking, "Why should any one way have to be imposed on all? Why cannot two or more ways coexist in the same society? Why should there be any monopoly on what is available?"

Pregnancy and birth are normal biological events. They are not medical events, but they take place within a cultural context and are colored by the beliefs and attitudes of the community at large. Hopefully, this book will give you a bigger sense of these events as they occur in this larger community, and help you to find the information and support you need to plan for your own birth environment and the arrival of your new baby.

You deserve to have true informed consent regarding the decisions you make during this time. While it sounds like a fancy term, informed consent simply means that you have the right to know the risks and benefits of treatment, and the right to choose which procedures you want during pregnancy and birth, regardless of how commonly they are used. All too often, we undergo procedures passively, without being aware that we could question or even decline a treatment.

Informed consent has been a legal principle for 100 years in the United States. This doctrine requires practitioners to disclose all information needed to make a decision, and requires that consent be given voluntarily and without coercion. The concept of informed consent is critical: in thousands of letters to Mothering magazine, women have said that they regret that they had not known more about their choices during pregnancy and birth.

The advice and suggestions in this book are based not only on scientific evidence but on the experiences of these women who have come to trust Mothering magazine as a respected authority on natural family living.

Mothers-to-be are often confused by the conflicting medical literature that is available. For example, guests on talk shows routinely quote contradictory findings to prove a specific point. In addition, practices in common use are not always supported by medical research. As a pregnant woman, you will want to look carefully at the evidence, so I have sought out a definitive and objective resource.

The recommendations in this book are based on Oxford University's Effective Care in Pregnancy and Childbirth, a 1,500-page, two-volume book that summarizes the most authoritative international studies available on the effects of care practices during pregnancy, during childbirth, and after the baby is born. The first edition, published in 1989, was widely acclaimed as a landmark publication. For the first time, evidence-based information on the effects of pregnancy and childbirth care was made readable and accessible to all who needed and wanted it.

The second edition won first prize in the British Medical Association 1995 Medical Book Competition in the Primary Health Care category, and has been translated into several languages. The third edition of this book was prepared by the editors of the Cochrane Pregnancy and Childbirth Group, along with Murray W. Enkin, M.D., a prominent physician and author of the first edition.

Effective Care in Pregnancy and Childbirth has been compiled into an electronic database consisting of a register of over 9,000 controlled studies from almost 400 medical journals, in 18 different languages, from 85 different countries -- as well as a systematic review of their results. The suggestions here are based on the latest, most comprehensive scientific evidence, providing you with the most up-to-date information on which to compare choices for yourself during pregnancy and childbirth.

As the title implies, this book focuses on natural pregnancy and childbirth, subjects Mothering magazine has been reporting on for over twenty-five years. During that time, we've learned that women who experience natural childbirth not only report greater satisfaction with their birth experiences than those who do not, but also feel less pain and discomfort during the early weeks and months of motherhood. It is unfortunate, therefore, that these concepts have been misunderstood in recent years. For instance, some consider a birth "natural" simply if the mother is conscious, while others, more accurately, understand that a natural childbirth is a drug-free birth. Even more unfortunate is the fact that so few women are helped and encouraged to have a natural birth.

You may be frightened when the subject turns to drugs in labor and wonder if natural birth means that your choices will be limited. Some of you would hate to have drugs foisted on you; others want to make sure that you have access to the comfort level of your choice. In pregnancy and birth, what you want is simply choice. And yet you may not realize how much your choices are limited by the constructed culture of birth, by custom unsupported by evidence, and by our general lack of exposure to and discomfort with birth. For example, most women will experience ultrasound scans during their pregnancies, even though ultrasound is not recommended for routine use by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Electronic fetal monitors are routinely used in hospital birth, yet they have never been shown in scientific studies to be any more effective than a simple stethoscope. And it may surprise you to learn that birth is safe in any setting -- home, hospital, birth center -- although only 1 percent of births in the United States take place outside of a hospital.

Twenty-three other countries have better birth outcomes than we do in the United States. All of these countries spend less money on health care than we do. Even with all of our technology, we are not protecting as many babies and mothers as other countries do with less. American insurance companies define pregnancy as a disability; obstetrical medicine acts defensively to ward off malpractice suits; pharmaceutical companies and manufacturers of birth technology entice practitioners to try their products by offering incentives; in short, as a culture, we are uncomfortable with the intimate physical events of pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding.

What do those twenty-three countries have in common -- those who spend less money yet have better birth outcomes than the United States? All of them rely on midwives. In New Zealand, for example, midwives attend 70 percent of births. In the United States, midwives attend nearly 10 percent of births.

Compare these labor and delivery outcomes for low-risk mothers who were clients of certified nurse-midwives (CNMs) with the clients of physicians (M.D.s):

Labor and Delivery Procedure CNMs M.D.s

Oxytocin induction* 8.5% 15.2%

Oxytocin augmentation** 11.7% 37.2%

Internal electronic fetal monitor 16.2% 43.5%

Epidural anesthesia 17.3% 32.7%

Episiotomies 10.8% 35.4%

Third- and fourth-degree lacerations*** 6.6% 23.3%

Operative deliveries**** 11.0% 30.1%

* Oxytocin induction is the use of the drug oxytocin to attempt to end pregnancy and stimulate labor to begin.

** Oxytocin augmentation is the use of oxytocin to attempt to increase the strength or effectiveness of labor contractions.

*** Third- and fourth-degree lacerations are tears of the perineum, usually following an episiotomy, that extend into the rectum.

**** Operative deliveries include those delivered by vacuum extraction, forceps, or cesarean section

The Institutes of Medicine, the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress, and the National Commission to Prevent Infant Mortality have all published statements of support for the development of nurse midwifery in the United States. In 1989, the National Birth Center Study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, a study that demonstrat...

Customer Reviews

Fabulous book!
GREAT book!! Highly recommended for anyone who'd like to learn more about their options in childbirth. For a natural health promoter such as myself, I thoroughly enjoyed reading and learning... not pregnant yet, but plan to be in the future and this helped inform me of what to look forward too and the choices that I have.

Guide book
Anything that comes from Mothering Magazine I have found to be sound information. It is nice to know that there are concious people out there who trust in nature.

I expected more from Mothering. :P
Let me start by saying this is not a BAD book. If you are looking for an introduction to Natural Birth, this is a good beginner's guide. HOWEVER ~ having been a reader of Mothering magazine for a number of years, I expected something a bit more earthy, natural, and... well, RADICAL. This book is not it. It does discuss a wealth of topics, and as an alternative to some atrocity like the ridiculous "What to Expect..." guides, this is great, and I encourage you to read it ~ as a jumping off point for something a bit more Natural, like "Prenatal Yoga and Natural Childbirth," by Jeannine Parvati Baker.

I walked away from this book disappointed, and with the distinct suspicion that Peggy O'Mara watered down her views simply to appeal to a wider audience.