Product Description

Essential guide to the bewildering array of delivery options available.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #204263 in Books
• Published on: 1992-11-25
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

New Age Sourcebook
This book is great! Thorough, sensible, and extremely well organized, these knowledgeable authors cover topics of pregnancy, labor, birth, and postpartum care for mother and child in an accessible, very easy-to-follow format. (The Doula)

The authors present clear-headed information on everything from finding a birth attendant to questions for the hospital to understanding your feelings about it all.

New Age Sourcebook
The authors present clear-headed information on everything from finding a birth attendant to questions for the hospital to understanding your feelings about it all.

Peggy OMara, Publisher of Mothering Magazine
A Good Birth, A Safe Birth is one of the top birth preparation books. Every woman should read it. A lot of women speak through this book. A lot of womens lives will be changed by reading it.

Customer Reviews

A must read!
I read this book with my first child and I would highly recommend it to anyone! It is valuable information, especially for a first pregnancy! I was armed with enough information to make informative decisions and have the natural birth that I wanted!

fear, uncertainty and doubt
The cultural view of 'childbirth as a near death experience' in the U.S. is very real, so I thought I'd comment:

How to read a book: with a mind open to learn. with research abilities. with a desire to explore further when something presented swirls up strong FEELINGS within, the stronger the feelings -> the more is required of self to face an honest effort to discover truth.

Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt: culturally, we have slaughtered the truth that pregnancy is a normal state and childbirth is a normal function of the mature female body. The best kept childbirth secret is that normalacy IS safest for mother and baby, as well as most satisfying....and that for the majority of mothers it really isn't difficult "to have it normal". Yes, there ARE deviances from normal, as well as actual complications, that may place a different spin on the nature of the experience of childbirth, and which may cause normalacy in childbirth to be more difficult or impossible to achieve safetly or with desire. How often does that occur ? Depends on who you ask ! There really is a difference between being delivered (and the support is for the medicalized experience) and giving birth (and the support is for keeping mother comfortable and confident).

Normalacy in childbirth is attainable, is protective and provides A Best Birth, A Safest Birth. To step forth with a bit of free-mind effort in the pursuit of discovery of why this is so~ there are questions such as: What IS normal ? Why is it protective ? What causes some women enjoyment of childbirth without drugs or surgery, while some scream asap (before labor !) for elective paraplegia (aka: epidural) or elective surgery (aka: just take it out) ? Why does the World Health Organization urge the U.S. to return to a midwife-based system of maternity care ?

A Good Birth, A Safe Birth, as well as Obstetric Myths VS. Research Realities and The Thinking Woman's Guide to a Better Birth (to name a couple) will provide assistance in gaining a meaningful education on the subject of birthing normally.

Biased and Outdated Work by Unqualified Authors
The title requires some translation: by "a safe birth," the authors mean "safe from the interference of doctors and nurses," and by "the childbirth experience you want," they mean childbirth with a minimum of interference from doctors or nurses, which they claim is the way most women want it. If you already know that's what you want, this book may seem a bracing pep talk on how to talk back to the medical establishment. However, if you're either unsure how you feel or, worse, if you actually think you'd like some medicinal pain relief during what's widely agreed to be the most painful experience in most women's lives, this book is not for you. I'm not sure how they selected the women they surveyed on birth preferences, but considering that they quoted only about 1 woman who actually wanted drugs rather than having them forced upon her by evil doctors, I have my doubts about their selection methods. In my own experience, I have yet to come upon a woman who got the sort of athletic satisfaction out of the unmitigated pain of labor that seems so common among their interviewees. Most of the women I know seem to think pain hurts, and it'd be nice to have less of it.

The authors claim that interventions by doctors (all sorts of pain medications, inducing labor, episiotomy, and especially caesarean sections) only make childbirth more dangerous for both mother and baby. This seems highly dubious to me, because far more women and babies died during childbirth before these techniques were invented. They back up all their conclusions by citing scientific studies, but neither of them is a scientist, a doctor, a nurse, a public health specialist, an epidemiologist, or a midwife, so I doubt they really have the qualification to do the kind of scientific analysis of birth technologies that they claim to be doing, and I strongly suspect them of cherry-picking studies that support their ideological convictions and ignoring evidence to the contrary.

In addition, a book written in 1992 about childbirth choices is likely to be completely outdated for women giving birth in the age of Damaged Care, I mean Managed Care. To give you a hint of the problem, while the authors mention HMOs, they feel the need to define the term. The health care world has changed, and many of the options they describe may not be options any more.