With Mindful Birthing, Nancy Bardacke, nurse-midwife and mindfulness teacher, lays out her innovative program for pregnancy, childbirth, and beyond. Drawing on groundbreaking research in neuroscience, mindfulness meditation, and mind/body medicine, Bardacke offers practices that will help you find calm and ease during this life-changing time, providing lifelong skills for healthy living and wise parenting. SOME OF THE BENEFITS OF MINDFUL BIRTHING: Increases confidence and decreases fear of childbirth Taps into deep inner resources for working with pain Improves couple communication, connection, and cooperation Provides stress-reducing skills for greater joy and wellbeing
"Giving birth is the pivotal moment of a woman's life but it is often treated as a medical procedure, and not as a rite of passage. Birthing from Within offers parents engaging and memorable ways for pregnant women, and their partners, to activate personal, social and spiritual resources that will guide them through labour and afterwards. Many birth classes teach from the 'outside', from the perspective of the professional. Yet, knowledge of anatomy and the stages of labour can often seem irrelevant in the intensity of contraction. The pregnant woman needs to know about labour and birth from her own perspective, she needs to be prepared for birthing from within. Pam England offers a method that allows a woman to fully understand her own strengths and resources. The self-discoveries made during pregnancy makes birth life-enhancing and empowers the future of the family. It is a multi-sensory and holistic approach that aims to make parents feel positively informed about what they are about to experience, confident about the birth of their child. Pain is an inevtiable part of childbirth but Birthing from Within provides resources for building pain-coping confidence in parents. It gives detailed instructions on dealing with normal labour pain and when the humane use of drugs may be called for."--Cover.
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.
When infertility painfully interrupted Elizabeth Hagan's plan to start a family, the path of grace offered her another way. Instead of giving birth to a child, she birthed herself instead. Along the way, she learned you can't control how fast your dreams come true, if they come true at all, but you can find grace for embracing your life in the present tense, grief and all. Through her new book Birthed, Elizabeth Hagan offers her story as a companion and guide for living through your own pain and loss. For the one in eight couples who face infertility, you will know you are not alone and a long season of grief does not have to destroy your marriage or your friendships with childbearing friends. For those friends and family members of infertile couples, there are no "one size fits all" answers to a fertility journey-medically, emotionally, or spiritually-and the worst thing you can say is nothing at all. Adoption is never the complete solution to infertility, and through it all, pain can never be fixed, only lived through. So allow grace to help you begin to live today in the present moment.
The deprivations and cruelty of slavery have overshadowed our understanding of the institution's most human dimension: birth. We often don't realize that after the United States stopped importing slaves in 1808, births were more important than ever; slavery and the southern way of life could continue only through babies born in bondage. In the antebellum South, slaveholders' interest in slave women was matched by physicians struggling to assert their own professional authority over childbirth, and the two began to work together to increase the number of infants born in the slave quarter. In unprecedented ways, doctors tried to manage the health of enslaved women from puberty through the reproductive years, attempting to foster pregnancy, cure infertility, and resolve gynecological problems, including cancer. Black women, however, proved an unruly force, distrustful of both the slaveholders and their doctors. With their own healing traditions, emphasizing the power of roots and herbs and the critical roles of family and community, enslaved women struggled to take charge of their own health in a system that did not respect their social circumstances, customs, or values. Birthing a Slave depicts the competing approaches to reproductive health that evolved on plantations, as both black women and white men sought to enhance the health of enslaved mothers--in very different ways and for entirely different reasons. Birthing a Slave is the first book to focus exclusively on the health care of enslaved women, and it argues convincingly for the critical role of reproductive medicine in the slave system of antebellum America.
"The babies I helped birth taught me that babies are far more than just the tiny body they present visually. They taught me about the vibration of consciousness that enlivens the body. They taught me, that taking utmost care of their body is the best care for the soul, for only a pristine body can carry its full divinity. With the holistic practices of Sacred Birthing, and without haste and interference, babies can maintain their energetic excellence and alignment during the experience of labor and birth."
There is a global crisis in maternal health care for black women. In the United States, black women are over three times more likely to perish from pregnancy-related complications than white women; their babies are half as likely to survive the first year. Many black women experience policing, coercion, and disempowerment during pregnancy and childbirth and are disconnected from alternative birthing traditions. This book places black women's voices at the center of the debate on what should be done to fix the broken maternity system and foregrounds black women's agency in the emerging birth justice movement. Mixing scholarly, activist, and personal perspectives, the book shows readers how they too can change lives, one birth at a time.
Birthing a Mother is the first ethnography to probe the intimate experience of gestational surrogate motherhood. In this beautifully written and insightful book, Elly Teman shows how surrogates and intended mothers carefully negotiate their cooperative endeavor. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork among Jewish Israeli women, interspersed with cross-cultural perspectives of surrogacy in the global context, Teman traces the processes by which surrogates relinquish any maternal claim to the baby even as intended mothers accomplish a complicated transition to motherhood. Teman’s groundbreaking analysis reveals that as surrogates psychologically and emotionally disengage from the fetus they carry, they develop a profound and lasting bond with the intended mother.
Sacred Birthing, Birthing A New Humanity book is my journey as a midwife, and how I was shown that there was more to birthing babies than just that tiny beautiful baby. It is really all about consciousness, not only for the baby, but also for the parents. In the first edition, published in 2003, I just had to write down all the stories, realizations and understanding that was inside me. Then I had to grow up and come of age.As I grew, "What about the baby?" was always my question as I heard birth becoming more and more about medical procedures, technology, drugs and pain. But I kept thinking, what must it feel like to the baby? We need to think about the pristine, delicate, sensitive baby who is experiencing her out-of-the-belly-life for the first time. And so, Soul-Needs, that which upholds a baby's radiance, were honored and highlighted to enunciate this. Babies' Soul-Needs turned everything around and placed the priorities correctly. This makes it clear, for its the baby's birth. Not the moms. We had our own birth. This is our baby's birth, and we are here to do all we can for their birth to be its best. Sacred Birthing Insights are the principles for parent's actions to support their baby's highest birth. These bring parents into coherence with their baby's needs.If we wish to go into a new direction, new choices must be made in order to turn the corner away from the old loop and into new possibilities. This can only be created when we jump out of the box of, birth as it is. Are we able to let go of all its outdated stories? If it is true that there is "a new kind of birth for the Master Souls coming," then we wish to do all we can to implement the softest birth for our baby. By refining our understanding of what each soul needs from us to anchor rightly into life, we can offer what they need by the way we give birth. Our goal is to honor and protect a baby's energetic excellence, so that each is "well-born," and a pristine newborn is received. This is a stepping stone into that new paradigm of birth. Instead of being birthed into pain, what if a baby were born into rushes of bliss? What if joy and gratitude were the feelings mom authentically expresses? What if mom could 'sing out her baby' as a gift to the Earth? There are so many options of love that can cradle your baby on her journey. What it takes is for us to shift the way we think and feel. Our baby's highest birth will take our willingness, and the absolute strength of intention. Are we ready to trust that there is a delicious way to give birth that better supports this baby's life? Are we willing to be in the place of "not knowing how it will happen," but trusting it will? Our Wise-Self and Guardians have been waiting for our request to determine our own higher paradigm of birth. Then as we stand back expectantly, nature will lead the way. And when one of us, and then another, and another creates this higher paradigm of birth, then the hundredth monkey jumps in, and it's real for everyone. It's already happening.
