Ina May's Guide to Childbirth Book

This is an essential read if you're pregnant and filled not just with fetus but with a fundamental doubt, as I was, that you're physically or mentally capable of pushing it out at the end. If you're skeptical that you're going to be able to move a small person from one of your internal organs to the world via your vaginal opening, Ina May will clear all that up for you. The birth stories in this book, and Gaskin's explanations of the process, gave me a total confidence in my ability to do this crazy-sounding thing. By the time I was done, I no longer saw childbirth as a terrifying and improbable medical event akin to removing a highly delicate ship from a design-flawed bottle; instead, I was convinced that childbirth is an awesome natural process, something I was built to do and totally capable of accomplishing.

Huge caveat, though: this book removed my fear of childbirth but gave me a new and overwhelming terror of hospitals. I found this to be true of most natural childbirth books (with some exceptions, including my favorite Birthing from Within): the confidence they gave me in my body's ability to give birth came at the cost of a raging fear of hospitals and "non-natural" childbirth. Ina May made me terrified of mainstream medicine's approach to birth, and the book got hard to read at a certain point because I was like, "Yeah, sure, this birth would be wonderful if I were doing it on Ina May's hippie commune, but since I'm doing it in a shitty Miami hospital those doctors are going to cut me up into pieces and mess up my baby with all kinds of unnecessary and frightening interventions. Eek!" I wound up spending a lot of my pregnancy terrified of what would happen to me at the hospital, and convinced that medical professionals would make traumatic what would otherwise be an awesome and beautiful experience.

In the end (I had my baby two days ago), I think this hysteria about hospitals did ultimately help me. My fear of hospital delivery wound up being productive, and I was extremely lucky to have exactly the birth experience I wanted, because I stayed home until the last possible minute and literally arrived at the hospital at the moment that I had to push. If the natural childbirth books hadn't made me so insanely fearful of what labor in the hospital would be like, I would've gone in earlier and probably wound up taking drugs, which I really didn't want to do. That said, though, there are perfectly valid reasons why some of us do give birth in hospitals, and not all hospital births are the nightmare that natural childbirth books make them out to be. I do definitely recommend this one, but I also recommend reading other books to fill out a more balanced view, unless you are definitely giving birth under the stars on a hippie commune and your chances of winding up in a hospital are extremely low.