‘In The Birth Space … you will find the information and support that will take you from conception through matrescence, with deeper calm, confidence and power.’ Aviva Romm, MD The Birth Space is a doula's guide to conception, pregnancy, birth and postpartum that highlights choice and rights in the perinatal space. In this beautiful book, trained and experienced doula Gabrielle Nancarrow offers comprehensive information about the birthing landscape that will empower you to choose the right birth for you – whether that be an obstetric, midwife or home birth. The Birth Space shows us how to prepare our minds and bodies for pregnancy and labour, from conscious conception through to postpartum and into matrescence. Gabrielle helps us understand what to expect during this period and translates the medical terminology so we are informed. She also provides remedies for common ailments, shares insights from other birth specialists, and is a constant spiritual guide from conception and beyond…talk about continuity of care! Filled with moving photography by Ilsa Wynne-Hoelscher Kidd (@ilsa_whk), Lisa Sorgini @lisa.sorgini, and Hayden Trace (@feelinghomeagain) as well as intimate real-life stories from contributors covering pregnancy loss, IVF, same-sex conception, home births, caesareans and more, The Birth Space is the essential companion for anyone who is seeking guidance as they enter this new chapter of their life.

Focusing on the wide spectrum of feelings that may arise when with child, this companion to the emotional journey caused by pregnancy, birth, and early parenting offers informative resources and homeopathic remedies for both parents-to-be and childbirth practitioners. With advice about laying fears to rest, keeping birth gentle, and protecting the baby-moon, this hand-held doula helps couples face the choices on their journey to parenthood as well as adjust to their new roles as parents, all the while emphasizing the spiritual journey of birth by putting the mother's emotional and spiritual needs before her physical requirements. Proposing that the experience of childbirth has the capacity to nourish rather than replete the soul, the book encourages women to take responsibility for their own birthing process and to surrender to their own instinctive powers rather than to those of medical intervention.

Scholars turn to reproduction for its ability to illuminate the practices involved with negotiating personhood for the unborn, the newborn, and the already-existing family members, community members, and the nation. The scholarship in this volume draws attention to doula work as intimate and relational while highlighting the way boundaries are created, maintained, challenged, and transformed. Intimate labour as a theoretical construct provides a way to think about the kind of care doulas offer women across the reproductive spectrum. Doulas negotiate boundaries and often blur the divisions between communities and across public and private spheres in their practice of intimate labour. This book weaves together three main threads: doulas and mothers, doulas and their community, and finally, doulas and institutions. The lived experience of doulas illustrates the interlacing relationships among all three of these threads. The essays in this collection offer a unique perspective on doulas by bringing together voices that represent the full spectrum of doula work, including the viewpoints of birth, postpartum, abortion, community based, adoption, prison, and radical doulas. We privilege this broad representation of doula experiences to emphasize the importance of a multi-vocal framing of the doula experience. As doulas move between worlds and learn to live in liminal spaces, they occupy space that allows them to generate new cultural narratives about birthing bodies.

Experienced doula, Linsey Bliss, shows you how to prepare physically and mentally for every element of having a child, from pregnancy to fourth trimester in The Doula's Guide to Empowering Your Birth. Lindsey Bliss, who has assisted as a doula at hundreds of births and is herself a mother of seven, reveals here all the wisdom and advice that doulas share with the new mothers who hire them. The Doula's Guide to Empowering Your Birth covers the period from pregnancy through labor and birth to fourth trimester healing. The focus, however, is on preparing for birth--including topics like how to pick the right childbirth class and the right birthing method. You’ll also see how to assemble the team of professionals, family members, and friends who will support you through labor and birth, and how to approach last-minute decisions about pain medications and cesarean sections. Bliss's tone throughout is at once authoritative and confident as well as warm and encouraging. Her concern in her practice as well as in these pages is to listen to and help secure each new mom's own personal vision of a birthing experience that is safe, fulfilling, and meaningful.

An inclusive, non-judgmental, and empowering guide to pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum life that puts mothersfirst, offering straightforward guidance on all the options and issues that matter most to them (and their partners) when preparing for a baby. In Birth Without Fear, January Harshe--founder of the global online community Birth Without Fear--delivers an honest, positive, and passionate message of empowerment surrounding everything that involves having a baby. It's a guide that fills in the considerable cracks in the information available to women and families when they're preparing to welcome a child--covering care provider choices, medical freedom, birth options, breastfeeding, intimacy, postpartum depression, and much more. Birth Without Fear shows moms, dads, partners, and families how to choose the best provider for them, how to trust in themselves and the birth process, and how to seek the necessary help after the baby has arrived. In addition, it will educate them about their rights--and how to use their voice to exercise them--as well as how to cope with the messy postpartum feelings many people aren't willing to talk about. Unlike other pregnancy books, Birth Without Fear will also help partners understand what mothers are going through, as well as discuss the challenges that they, too, will face--and how they can navigate them. Shattering long-held myths and beliefs surrounding pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum experience, Birth Without Fear is an accessible, reassuring, and ultimately inspiring guide to taking charge of pregnancy, childbirth, and beyond.

"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.

Midwives and other healthcare providers are grappling with the issue of rising intervention rates in childbirth and trying to identify ways to reverse the trend. It is increasingly accepted that intervention in childbirth has long-term consequences for women and their children. Birth Territory provides practical, evidence-based ideas for restructuring the birth territory to facilitate normal birth. Links new research findings to birth environments and outcomes. Describes the elements of an ideal birthing environment. Suggests how to modify existing maternity services to achieve optimal results. Investigates the links between the experiences of women and babies, and outcomes. Explores the effects of legal and socio-political factors.

As you prepare to become a mother, you face an experience unlike any other in your life. Having a baby will redirect your preferences and pleasures and, most likely, will realign some of your values.As you undergo this unique psychological transformation, you will be guided by new hopes, fears, and priorities. In a most startling way, having a child will influence all of your closest relationships and redefine your role in your family's history. The charting of this remarkable, new realm is the subject of this compelling book.Renowned psychiatrist Daniel N. Stern has joined forces with pediatrician and child psychiatrist Nadia Bruschweiler-Stern and journalist Alison Freeland to paint a wonderfully evocative picture of the psychology of motherhood. At the heart of The Birth of a Mother is an arresting premise: Just as a baby develops physically in utero and after birth, so a mother is born psychologically in the many months that precede and follow the birth of her baby.The recognition of this inner transformation emerges from hundreds of interviews with new mothers and decades of clinical experience. Filled with revealing case studies and personal comments from women who have shared this experience, this book will serve as an invaluable sourcebook for new mothers, validating the often confusing emotions that accompany the development of this new identity. In addition to providing insight into the unique state of motherhood, the authors touch on related topics such as going back to work, fatherhood, adoption, and premature birth.During pregnancy, mothers-to-be talk about morning sickness and their changing bodies, and new mothers talk about their exhaustion, the benefits of nursing or bottle-feeding, and the dilemma of whether or when they should return to work. And yet, they can be strangely mute about the dramatic and often overwhelming changes going on in their inner lives. Finally, with The Birth of a Mother, these powerful feelings are eloquently put into words.

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.