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41 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Extremely Outdated, Poorly Researched, Highly Negative, November 28, 2002
After two complicated pregnancies involving months of bedrest, I was very excited to find this book to read as I go through my third pregnancy. I was very, very dissappointed. I am a Lamaze Certified Childbirth Educator with extensive knowledge about pregnancy in general and very specific knowledge about my own two complications: Pregnancy Induced Hypertension and Preterm Labor. In addition to my own interests, I read this whole book hoping to learn more about other complications so that I could help my students who are experiencing these. There are several things that make this book almost useless: 1. The Research is EXTREMELY outdated. The book, originally published in 1991 claims to have been revised in 1996. However, checking her sources listed in the Bibliography, NONE of them are more recent than the 1980s. In reading the whole book, I realized she obviously didn't update any of her research and the explanations and medical information she gives are so outdated that they are useless at best and possibly harmful at worst [some of the information she gives on Pregnancy Induced Hypertension is not only wrong, it would be dangerous for a pregnant woman to follow her advice]. 10-15 years in the medical field is an *eternity* - things change so fast, new breakthroughs and research happen all the time and a book like this needs to either be kept accurately up to date or removed from publication. 2. Even her original research was bad. She is NOT an medical or scientific person, which could be really good for a book like this [we are looking for a lay person's explanation after all!]. However, she obviously had no real medical or scientifically knowledgeable person proof her book. It is full of errors that make it hard to believe anything she writes. For example, in the chapter on "when pregnancy IS perfect" she is discussing normal pregnancy and labor and delivery. She writes: "When the baby's head can be seen through the opening of the vagina, it is called crowning - because it is almost always the crown of the baby's head that emerges first." This is not accurate. Crowning occurs when the largest circumference of the baby's head is emerging through the perineum - when the vagina is stretched the most it will have to stretch. This has nothing to do with when the baby's head can first be seen - which can actually be hours before crowning occurs in some cases, depending on how long the pushing phase lasts. This is not a huge deal, but the book is FULL of little inaccuracies like this - my copy is just covered in highlights where I underlined what she wrote that was wrong. It was very hard for me to take the rest of the book seriously when she made so many very basic errors. Even the word "Foreword" is misspelled on the cover of the book - it is spelled "Forward". Poor editing and not enough scientific understanding plague this whole book in my opinion. 3. The book is extremely negative. The author lost her twin baby daughter soon after birth after a highly complicated pregnancy. She wrote this book as a way of coping with her grief and it shows. The book is very quick to bring up pregnancy loss and neonatal/infant death, often in places where it is innappropriate. I'm afraid that a pregnant woman reading this book would get a very skewed idea of her baby's chances of survival - the reality is that the VAST MAJORITY of complicated pregnancies end with a healthy child and a healthy mother. I think that reading this book would only add undue stress and worry for a pregnant mother in a complicated pregnancy situation, and I myself found the book very upsetting and difficult to read at times. [Even after having two successful healthy births after prior complicated pregnancies]. The reality is that babies do sometimes die. But we don't need to dwell so much on that possibility - we need to acknowledge it, do everything we can to prevent it, and then move on. Brooding over it doesn't help anyone. What is good about this book? There is an excellent chapter on "Pregnancy Loss: When the Worst Happens". It would be very useful to a couple who had lost a child. However, I would NEVER recommend that a pregnant mother read this chapter unless there were very clear and obvious reasons to believe that her pregnancy was absolutely going to end in death of the baby. For most mothers it would be an exercise in torture - upsetting to the extreme and not likely to be helpful in the majority of cases. Other than that, I didn't find any positives to this book. I strongly recommend against it and would suggest that a mother experiencing a complicated pregnancy get her information from her doctor and her own research from *reliable* and *up to date* sources. As far as bedrest goes, there is a MUCH better book on this topic. "The Pregnancy Bed Rest Book: A Survival Guide for Expectant Mothers and Their Families" by Amy E. Tracy is EXCELLENT. Buy that one instead. Personally I'm very sorry I spent the money on this book.
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by Mary Ann McCann
by Denise M. Chism
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