Birth Stories

Psychologist and birth trauma expert Maureen Campion shares her lessons for releasing the unexpected wounds that come from having a rough birth experience. Birth can be beautiful and spiritual and joyous but there are also terrifying, emotionally raw, painful moments that can be difficult to move past. This book offers you a chance to experience the healing power of working through your birth story, while learning about trauma and developing coping skills for all those complicated feelings. Maureen Campion shares her personal experience with birth trauma and the work she has been doing working with mothers through workshops and counseling to address resolving unexpected birth outcomes. Heal Your Birth Story offers new understanding to the impact of birth on mothers and their partners. Journaling exercises are offered to lead the reader through multiple layers of understanding and healing.

The delivery of high quality and equitable care for both mothers and newborns is complex and requires efforts across many sectors. The United States spends more on childbirth than any other country in the world, yet outcomes are worse than other high-resource countries, and even worse for Black and Native American women. There are a variety of factors that influence childbirth, including social determinants such as income, educational levels, access to care, financing, transportation, structural racism and geographic variability in birth settings. It is important to reevaluate the United States' approach to maternal and newborn care through the lens of these factors across multiple disciplines. Birth Settings in America: Outcomes, Quality, Access, and Choice reviews and evaluates maternal and newborn care in the United States, the epidemiology of social and clinical risks in pregnancy and childbirth, birth settings research, and access to and choice of birth settings.

Intimate and intensely personal, the forty-five first-person narratives contained in Real Birth: Women Share Their Stories offer readers a window into the complex and emotionally exciting experience of childbirth. Women from a full range of socioeconomic backgrounds and circumstances recount the childbirth choices they’ve made and the ways those choices have played themselves out in the real life contexts of their everyday lives. Readers meet women from all over the country who speak to us directly––no interviewer intrudes, no judgments intrude, and no single method of childbirth is advocated. Instead, these women offer us their candid experiences, presented clearly and unflinchingly. Medically reviewed by physicians Dr. Richard Randolph for the first edition and Dr. Deborah Morris for this second edition, Real Birth offers readers a plethora of correct information as well the kind of real scoop that other books and health care professionals are often reluctant to reveal. The result is a well-grounded book that reaches across the boundaries of childbirth literature. Real Birth is introduced by Ariel Gore, journalist, editor, writer, and founding editor/publisher of Hip Mama, an Alternative Press Award-winning publication about the culture of motherhood. Also included are an extensive glossary of medical terms, a thoroughly researched selective bibliography, and a list of resources of interest to pregnant women and new moms.

The surprising success of the stories in the first volume of Bearing Witness prompted a second volume with even more remarkable tales of childbirth told by doulas. Not only do these stories reveal the trials and triumphs of giving birth with the assistance of doulas and midwives, they are genuine works of art. What could be more creative, dramatic, and miraculous than birth?

Jane Dwinell has written an important book using real-life scenarios to illustrate her unique philosophy of childbirth, one that can only inspire women to take greater control over how and where they give birth. From her vantage point as a birth attendant, Dwinell recounts the moving birth experiences of twenty different women. Thus the reader learns that there are no right or wrong ways to give birth. In fact, the author shows how satisfying it can be for women to exercise their own strength, power and choice in the birth process instead of yielding to unnecessary technological and medical interventions. Birth, she says, is a process of wellness, not illness. Hence, most women don't need medication to help them deal with normal birth pains if they have the proper empowering support during labor. When women give birth in a comfortable setting of their choice, the medical wrongs against them, committed in hospitals in the name of safety and technology, are prevented. In the face of opposition from an entrenched segment of the medical establishment, Dwinell dares the view that hospital care should not be routine but should be given only with good reason and the women's permission. For pregnant women and their partners, Birth Stories makes a convincing argument that under normal circumstances wach women's intuitive knowledge and individual resources can help her to labor and deliver successfully in her own way. Nurses, midwives, doctors, and birth educators will find it useful to realize that there are many ways to give birth . . . that it is important for the family to be together and make their own choices . . . and that pregnant women can have safe births without excessive medical intervention. This book can also serve as a guide for professionals who want to develop this type of birthing model within their own institution.

Work out what kind of birth you really want, and learn how to maximise your chances of getting it, in this refreshing, warm and witty guide to pregnancy, birth and the early weeks. Packed with vital and cutting-edge information on everything from building the ultimate birth plan, to your choices and rights in the birth room; from optimal cord clamping, to seeding the microbiome; from the inside track on breastfeeding, to woman-centred caesarean, The Positive Birth Book shows you how to have the best possible birth, regardless of whether you plan to have your baby in hospital, in the birth centre, at home or by elective caesarean. Find out how the environment you give birth in, your mindset and your expectations can influence the kind of birth you have, and be inspired by the voices of real women, who tell you the truth about what giving birth really feels like. Challenging negativity and fear of childbirth, and brimming with everything you need to know about labour, birth, and the early days of parenting, The Positive Birth Book is the must-have birth book for women of the 21st century.

True Birth features a compilation of heart-warming birth stories and a series of childbirth-related articles. It presents the multifaceted dimensions of childbirth by examining both the personal experience of the mother, as well as the evidence-based research surrounding various childbirth issues. We hope you rejoice in the birth of a baby, and of a mother, while recognizing that the way a mother experiences birth, and remembers it, is important. Childbirth discourse is upon us, but it is up to every one of us to guide the discourse into a positive interpretation, which showcases the sheer power of women, and presents them as strong individuals who have the right to birth in a respectful and supportive environment. "When women prepare themselves as their most important ally for birth, they find their true power." "Childbirth for me was the most empowering and transformational experience of my life." "Your body is designed to do it! You are strong. You can do it! Just don't forget to breathe."

Edited by Carole Monnier Clark with Chelsie Anderson The idea for this book was born during long postpartum talks with newborn babies in arms and toddlers running wild at our feet. As we shared our own birth stories with each other it became clear that we wanted to hear more about other people's experiences, all kinds of experiences, and we felt that others would too. That's what we asked for and that's exactly what we got! Here you'll find tales about labour and delivery as varied as their authors. From natural births to hospital births, planned C-sections to home births, slow deliveries to speedy arrivals, twins born in the hospital and at home, birth in the wake of natural disaster, to the perfect birth plans that work out and those that don't. There's adventure in these pages; the adventure that comes along with welcoming new life into this world, which in turn fundamentally changes the life of those who welcome it.