Women's Mental Health: A Comprehensive Textbook Book

Ugh, rubbish. This book claims to be an unbiased exploration of all birth options available so a pregnant woman can draw her own conclusions and make her own choice. Bullshit. So much colored and loaded language--much as I love the repetitive implications that I am an anti-vaxxer "crunchy granola" superstition-loving technology rejecting smug hippy for wanting a natural birth, the ridiculous mischaracterisation and falseness of it pretty much destroys any credibility I might bestow upon her when she "explores" the more medicated options.

I do appreciate that she has bothered to footnote her work.
It's interesting how dismissive she is of studies that support natural birth tenets, and how she downplays the side effects of the medications. But at least they are mentioned and footnoted, so it's not quite as steaming a pile of useless garbage as _It Gets Better: and Other Lies..._. Not quite. But her bias clearly skews the work, so it's pretty unacceptable in something marketed toward being an objective source of information to help women "make the childbirth choice that's right for YOU."

It's ironic, because I fully support the idea of women choosing whatever birth they want--I think if you have a lot of fear of pain/childbirth then you probably will do better with medical intervention. But I disagree with her portrait of women who want a home-birth/birth center birth/natural childbirth as being the control freaks. A natural labor is all about letting go--the control is the medication. And that's fine; there's room to feel empowered on both sides of the unmedicated/medicated issue when the woman takes the time to learn as much as she can about each process and finds a practitioner they can trust. It's not like childbirth is an unexpected event (for most of us).

Informed consent is a bit of a myth, but the long delay between discovering one is pregnant and giving birth at least gives us a more than fair amount of time to educate ourselves as much as possible on all possible aspects. It's just a pity when something purporting to be unbiased and factual is so unhelpfully laden with the author's own misconceptions or ignorances. It reinforces the negative stereotype of the woman who chooses a standard hospital birth as someone who just hasn't bothered to have any intellectual curiosity regarding the process at all. It's worse than a waste of time when it slides me backwards on the good ol' empathy scale.

Her "willful blindness" also extends to including a lot of fear imagery when talking about childbirth, so if anyone reading this is fairly sure they'd like a natural childbirth, this book is definitely unhelpful in that respect and isn't an objective source for information on the topic anyway, so better to skip it and spend your time reading Penny Simkin's _Pregnancy, Childbirth and the Newborn_ as a starting point for decision making, since she actually does have objective information on birthing methods and interventions. The Mayo Clinic Guide also does a better job of objectively informing the reader of the options, techniques and processes involved with the various methods and is just all around awesome--facts, not feelings and each topic is well-covered.