Birth Becomes Hers

Go beyond "natural birth" and see birth as it was meant to be - empowered, unhindered, and free. From her experience as a mother of five (two assisted and three unassisted births), and as a birth and postpartum doula, author Bree Moore offers advice and stories of unassisted birth. *Why you should consider home birth *Getting your partner on board *Unassisted pregnancy and prenatal care supply list *A unique recipe for healing a perineal tear - with seaweed! *How to decide who to have at your home birth*Doulas and unassisted birth *Building intuition *Understanding fear and how to handle it *What to do when someone else calls 9-1-1 *Identifying true emergencies and when to transfer Birth Becomes Hers also contains a collection of more than 40 planned unassisted home birth stories. Stories include everything from the most straightforward of births to VBAC/HBAC, breech birth, and an unassisted birth of twins. This diverse collection of stories examines freebirth from a variety of angles, offering you the ability to learn and grow on your own path to home birth. For women who love “Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth” by Ina May Gaskin, “Homebirth on Your Own Terms” by Heather Baker, and “Birth Unhindered” by Tara L McGuire. Start reading Birth Becomes Hers today to inspire your birth journey!

The Birth House is the story of Dora Rare, the first daughter to be born in five generations of Rares. As a child in an isolated village in Nova Scotia, she is drawn to Miss Babineau, an outspoken Acadian midwife with a gift for healing. Dora becomes Miss B.’s apprentice, and together they help the women of Scots Bay through infertility, difficult labours, breech births, unwanted pregnancies and even unfulfilling sex lives. Filled with details as compelling as they are surprising, The Birth House is an unforgettable tale of the struggles women have faced to have control of their own bodies and to keep the best parts of tradition alive in the world of modern medicine.

As you prepare to become a mother, you face an experience unlike any other in your life. Having a baby will redirect your preferences and pleasures and, most likely, will realign some of your values.As you undergo this unique psychological transformation, you will be guided by new hopes, fears, and priorities. In a most startling way, having a child will influence all of your closest relationships and redefine your role in your family's history. The charting of this remarkable, new realm is the subject of this compelling book.Renowned psychiatrist Daniel N. Stern has joined forces with pediatrician and child psychiatrist Nadia Bruschweiler-Stern and journalist Alison Freeland to paint a wonderfully evocative picture of the psychology of motherhood. At the heart of The Birth of a Mother is an arresting premise: Just as a baby develops physically in utero and after birth, so a mother is born psychologically in the many months that precede and follow the birth of her baby.The recognition of this inner transformation emerges from hundreds of interviews with new mothers and decades of clinical experience. Filled with revealing case studies and personal comments from women who have shared this experience, this book will serve as an invaluable sourcebook for new mothers, validating the often confusing emotions that accompany the development of this new identity. In addition to providing insight into the unique state of motherhood, the authors touch on related topics such as going back to work, fatherhood, adoption, and premature birth.During pregnancy, mothers-to-be talk about morning sickness and their changing bodies, and new mothers talk about their exhaustion, the benefits of nursing or bottle-feeding, and the dilemma of whether or when they should return to work. And yet, they can be strangely mute about the dramatic and often overwhelming changes going on in their inner lives. Finally, with The Birth of a Mother, these powerful feelings are eloquently put into words.

Every pregnant woman has voices telling her what to expect, but not many of those voices are supportive when a woman desires to give birth at home.A woman's birth story, and her baby's birth story, are heavily influenced by the voices that surround her. These voices insist that the only thing that matters is a healthy baby, but the truth is that birth has far more to offer than the bare minimum.Childbirth can be an enlightened, powerful, joy and peace-filled experience, and the first step to getting there is receiving the knowledge and confidence to follow personal intuition.Bree Moore, birth keeper and mother to six, has compiled this expansive collection of season-themed unassisted birth stories to inspire and empower women navigating the realm of radical home birth.By reading these stories, the seeds of hope and vision for your pregnancy and birth will be planted and grow into a fruit that you can pick with joy and confidence.Birth is a unique sort of magic, and that magic can be found in abundance when women free themselves in birth.

Gender and body-based distinctions continue to be a defining component of women’s identities, both in psychoanalytic treatment and in life. Although females have made progress in many areas, their status within the human community has remained unstable and subject to societal whim. A Womb of Her Own brings together a distinguished group of contributors to explore, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the ways in which women’s sexual and reproductive capabilities, and their bodies, are regarded as societal and patriarchal property, not as the possession of individual women. It further examines how women have been viewed as the "other" and thus become the focus of mistreatment such as rape, sexual slavery, restriction of reproduction rights, and ongoing societal repression. Postmodern gender theories have greatly enhanced understanding of the fluidity of gender and freed women from repressive stereotypes, but attention has shifted prematurely from the power differential that continues to exist between men and women. Before the male/female binary is transcended, the limitations imposed upon women by the still prevailing patriarchal order must be addressed. To this end, A Womb of Her Own addresses issues such as the prevalence of rape culture and its historical roots; the relationship of the LGBT movement to feminism; current sexual practices such as sexting and tattooing and their meaning to women; reproductive issues including infertility; adoption; postpartum depression and the actual experience of birthing—all from the perspectives of women. The book also explores the cultural definitions of motherhood, and how such definitions set exacting standards both for the acceptable face of motherhood and for women generally. While women’s unique anatomy and biology have historically contributed to their oppression in a patriarchal society, it is the exploration and illumination of these capabilities from their own perspective that will allow women to claim and control them as their own. Covering a broad, topical range of contemporary subjects, A Womb of Her Own will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as scholars and students of gender and women’s studies.

Exploring the narratives that orient the lives of women scholars