56 of 57 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Must have for first time mothers, April 9, 2000
This book gave me so much confidence in my abilities to give birth naturally! I was a nervous first-time mother-to-be, but wanted to make a serious attempt at natural childbirth due to all the complications associated with epidurals and the like. I read my mother's copy from cover to cover and filed all the wonderful details away for use during my own labor. I was born in the 70's, and found the hippy langauge a little amusing, but brightly descriptive and calming. I like being talked to as a person who has a mind of her own, not someone who cannot make decisions of her own free will, as some other birthing books tend to do. I recommend this book highly to all new mothers that I meet. The message that you are completely capable of giving birth to the child living inside you with little or no intervention, aside from real emergencies, is an invaluable one, and all the actual recounts put you in this frame of mind. Ina May and the midwives in this book create a loving voice in your head that stays with you when you need it the most. With no fear tactics, either! What a novel idea... And I also have to add that I used tons of the information given to aid my labor, and it all worked, at various levels. It gave me the confidence to labor at home for the majority of the first day, and by the time I went into the hospital I was already 7 centimeters dialated, much to my surprise. I gave natural birth to a healthy baby boy the next day. Everyone's labor experience is different- I just wanted to share my real-life labor that was made significantly better by this book.
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135 of 150 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good news: vibes are real, January 18, 2003
This review is from: Spiritual Midwifery (Paperback)
I think I'm the first _man_ to review this book. In a way that's kind of sad, but hey, I don't mind going first, fellas. Besides, I've reviewed just about everything of Stephen Gaskin's I could find, and it's about time I reviewed Ina May's book.
And here in Ohio we've got a Mennonite midwife named Freida Miller who's doing time in prison. Why? Because she saved the life of a birthing mother by giving her prescription medication without a license. Worse, she's not even in prison for dispensing the meds; she's in prison because she refuses to reveal the name of the doctor who _gave_ her the meds in the first place. This displeases me and causes me to question the legal and pharmaceutical establishments even more than I already did, which is a lot. So consider this review my little blow for the revolution.
Ina May Gaskin wrote the book on midwifery -- four times, in fact, as the fourth edition of the book was published in 2002 and it gets longer every time. The new edition is updated with the usual stuff, including yet more stories from the parents and midwives at the Farm (including some stories from the babies, now all grown up, who were the subjects of the _original_ stories) and a new preface by Ina May. And if you're reading this page, you don't need me to tell you that it's the bible of practical midwifery.
What you may _not_ already know is what a spiritual book it is. Of course the title is _Spiritual Midwifery_, but some readers may be inclined to write that off as hippie jargon. As other reviewers have noted, there is some hippie jargon in the book, but I don't think you should read "around" it or "past" it. You should read _through_ it; it's part of the point. The medium really is sometimes the message, and this is the appropriate language for the concepts Ina May wants to lay on you.
What Ina May wants you to know, what she and the midwives at the Farm have successfully shown for thirty years and counting, is that birthing really is (or can be) a sacrament and that _how we be_ has a profound effect on _how we birth_. As Stephen remarks somewhere, the Farm midwives have successfully demonstrated that _vibes are real_. This is good news and it's important to more than birthing mothers -- even to more than women.
I don't mean to minimize the importance of the practical midwifing aspects of the book, either; it's just that I didn't read the book for that reason myself. (I was present at the births of both of my children, but they were born in the hospital as my wife preferred.)
The thing is, Ina May and Stephen are good people. In fact they manage to be both kind _and_ competent -- a difficult trick and one that I certainly haven't mastered myself. And there are lots of other good people represented in this book, in the stories and in the pictures. (The folks in the photos look like folks you'd want to meet. If you look at them right, you can actually see their souls.)
So this review is partly to help spread the word about midwifery and partly to help spread the word about these good people. Vibes _are_ real, it _does_ matter how we be, and don't let anybody tell you any different.
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38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
hippie terminology, but excellent information, January 4, 2000
When I first read this book, I must admit I was put off by the hippie language, and the way they referred to contractions as "rushes", which are an interesting sensation that requires all of your attention. I thought, who are they trying to kid? Despite my initial reaction, I have grown to love this book. If you can ignore the groovy hippie language (if it bothers you), this is a super book, chock full of consise information for both pregnant families and midwives. The language is plain, no "medicalese", and the information is sound. The book was written about The Farm, an intentional community started in Tennessee in the 1970's. When the women of the Farm started having babies, some women became midwives to serve them. Learning from experience and some helpful doctors and texts, they have had excellent results with maternal and infant health. Their statistics are better than any hospital I know of, as far as maternal and perinatal mortality. The book is half birth stories, and half information for parents and midwives. I recommend it for both consumers and midwives.
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