Holistic Midwifery Care During Pregnancy

How do you Create a Happy Healthy Baby? With joy, happiness, and fun! So how do you achieve that in this modern world? By creating a happy, healthy you with natural therapy techniques to help you relax and prepare yourself emotionally and physically for birth. There are many choices to be made as you prepare to give birth, such as: What foods are best for you and your baby? Where will you give birth and how? What can you expect in labor? What are your options and where do you go for assistance? Creating Happy Healthy Babies will help you understand the options available so you can make informed decisions that best suit you and your baby. Based on my extensive experience as a midwife, natural therapist, and mother, this is a compilation of the techniques, remedies, and therapies I and my clients have found most beneficial. Regardless of how you choose to have your baby, the therapies suggested in this book, such as reflexology, NET, psychosomatic therapy, Kahuna massage, acupressure, Su-Jok, phytonutrients, aromatherapy, herbal remedies, and relaxation techniques may be of help. Enjoy this book. I encourage you to ask questions, explore, and research.

This book about the art, craft and science of expert midwifery care, while focusing on ‘alternative physiological births’ that are those ‘outside’ of guidelines, the contents can be applied to any birthing choices. Drawing upon the findings of a PhD that captured the experiences of midwives who proactively supported alternative physiological births while working in the National Health Service, their practice was conceptualised as ‘skilled heartfelt practice’. Skilled heartfelt practice denotes the interrelationship between midwives’ attitudes and beliefs in support of women’s choices, their values of cultivating meaningful relationships, and their expert practical clinical skills. It is these qualities combined that give rise to what is called ‘full-scope midwifery’ as defined by the Lancet Midwifery Series. This book illuminates why and how these midwives facilitated safe, relational care. Using a combination of emotional intelligence skills and clinical expertise while centring women’s bodily autonomy, they ensured safe care was provided within a holistic framework. Moreover, this book offers insights for midwives to move beyond ‘rule-based’ practice, where the benefits of expert practice are illuminated. Midwives facilitating ‘alternative’ physiological births epitomise evidence-based practice, which centres the woman or birthing person as the expert in their life, and the midwife meets them where they are with expert skills to support them. But what does this look like in clinical practice, particularly for those employed by institutions, those ‘working within the system’ who have constraints that private or self-employed midwives don’t have? How does a midwife cultivate those skills within a culture and climate that devalues both relationships, midwives and women’s autonomy? This book aims to provide a roadmap for those seeking to cultivate these skills. The core focus will be the midwife-mother relationship from the perspectives of the midwives, rather than the midwives wider working relationships or workplace contexts. This is purposeful so to offer a deep dive into the nuanced and varied ways of delivering this type of care. However, the realities of practice are also firmly embedded with the book, tensions will be explored, limitations acknowledged.

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.

If you are pregnant, plan to be pregnant, or are curious about alternatives to medical childbirth, the POCKET GUIDE TO MIDWIFERY will provide you with complete information about: Safety and effectiveness of midwifery care. The different types of midwives. How to choose a midwife. The care midwives give. Midwifery and the law. National organizations.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book examines the concept of care and care practices in healthcare from the interdisciplinary perspectives of continental philosophy, care ethics, the social sciences, and anthropology. Areas addressed include dementia care, midwifery, diabetes care, psychiatry, and reproductive medicine. Special attention is paid to ambivalences and tensions within both the concept of care and care practices. Contributions in the first section of the book explore phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches to care and reveal historical precursors to care ethics. Empirical case studies and reflections on care in institutionalised and standardised settings form the second section of the book. The concluding chapter, jointly written by many of the contributors, points at recurring challenges of understanding and practicing care that open up the field for further research and discussion. This collection will be of great value to scholars and practitioners of medicine, ethics, philosophy, social science and history.