Years before I became pregnant, a good friend with a one-year-old son gave me a short book titled While Waiting: The Information You Need to Know About Pregnancy, Birth, and Delivery, by George E. Verrilli and Anne Marie Mueser. My friend said, “Read this. Don’t read What To Expect When You’re Expecting. It’s probably a [...]
Posts Tagged as ‘birth’
June 1, 2007
Baby Catcher, by Peggy Vincent
When I was about eight months pregnant, a friend who had given birth a year before recommended Peggy Vincent’s Baby Catcher: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife. She said it was the most helpful book she had read during pregnancy because it reassured her that babies can be born anywhere, under any circumstances: by the toilet, [...]
May 22, 2007
Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth
Since I’ve been reading so much on birth and parenting in the past six months, I thought I would share some of my findings. Ina May Gaskin is one of the “greats” of contemporary North American midwifery, and her Spiritual Midwifery has become a classic.
As the title suggests, the primary concern of her Guide is [...]
May 9, 2007
A Midwife’s Tale–Chronicle of a 19th-century New England Woman
Painstaking research by historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has produced this Pulitzer Prize winner—a captivating investigation into the life of a Maine midwife. Martha Ballard’s diary records not only her midwifery activities, but such mundane undertakings as weaving, washing clothes, visiting neighbors, and entertaining guests. With help from other historical documents of the period, Ulrich has [...]
