Midwifery mingle at event

i remember this woman from her hair care vids- to my surprise she offers labour tips too! Good tips too by the way. Just a note: you only need to resist the urge to push whilst the head is crowning, so the perineum has time to stretch. The midwife/Dr will tell you when to do this, and may advise one to slowly birth the head in ‘little pushes’ or panting breaths.

great advice. u look like the singer sade to me, amazingly beautiful

how was the cleanup?

I did it three times. Stay home as long as possible. I just had my daughter July 5. I didnt go to the hospital til my contractions were ontop of each other. 20 minutes after i got to the hospital and like 4 or five 5 pushes, she was out. But she hurt, 8 pound 2.4 ounces. But no stitches.

God helped me through a 26hr natural childbirth and my daughter wasn’t screaming! So ladies, it can be done.

OMG….I’m petrified

lol, it was a ‘crying pain’ for me!! i was induced (verrryyy unnatural type of labor) 29 hours, yea it was a crying begging pleading praying shouting yelling holding on for dear life pain for me!

I had to have intervention too! Both my kids are academically bright and striving – even skipped a grade too !!! All thanks to Jesus!

Every case is unique and while God is always at the front of it all, it is a matter of delivering safely. While I wanted to deliver naturally, it was not possible. Who knows, maybe one day!

Thank you for this video
Although I’ve never been pregnant before/yet, I do plan to have a natural childbirth at home because I think it’ll be better & less expensive than giving birth in a hospital.

Well i can’t have natural child birth.. because when i was a child like 2 month baby.. they had to sew me .. so they closed my vegina.. its hard to deal with this anyway.. so the doctor told me after a huge surgery that i almost died.. simply i can’t have a natural birth if i want to have a child.. it would be c section.. so i guess it meants to be..

I agree with you that natural delivery can be a beautiful experience. I gave both to both my children naturally. However, if you have to ask for pain meds., don’t feel like your a failure…Natural childbirth is extremely intense and everybody cannot tolerate that…

Review by for Spiritual Midwifery
Rating:
This book gave me so much confidence in my abilities to give birth naturally! I was a nervous first-time mother-to-be, but wanted to make a serious attempt at natural childbirth due to all the complications associated with epidurals and the like. I read my mother’s copy from cover to cover and filed all the wonderful details away for use during my own labor. I was born in the 70’s, and found the hippy langauge a little amusing, but brightly descriptive and calming. I like being talked to as a person who has a mind of her own, not someone who cannot make decisions of her own free will, as some other birthing books tend to do. I recommend this book highly to all new mothers that I meet. The message that you are completely capable of giving birth to the child living inside you with little or no intervention, aside from real emergencies, is an invaluable one, and all the actual recounts put you in this frame of mind. Ina May and the midwives in this book create a loving voice in your head that stays with you when you need it the most. With no fear tactics, either! What a novel idea… And I also have to add that I used tons of the information given to aid my labor, and it all worked, at various levels. It gave me the confidence to labor at home for the majority of the first day, and by the time I went into the hospital I was already 7 centimeters dialated, much to my surprise. I gave natural birth to a healthy baby boy the next day. Everyone’s labor experience is different- I just wanted to share my real-life labor that was made significantly better by this book.

Review by John S. Ryan for Spiritual Midwifery
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I think I’m the first _man_ to review this book. In a way that’s kind of sad, but hey, I don’t mind going first, fellas. Besides, I’ve reviewed just about everything of Stephen Gaskin’s I could find, and it’s about time I reviewed Ina May’s book.And here in Ohio we’ve got a Mennonite midwife named Freida Miller who’s doing time in prison. Why? Because she saved the life of a birthing mother by giving her prescription medication without a license. Worse, she’s not even in prison for dispensing the meds; she’s in prison because she refuses to reveal the name of the doctor who _gave_ her the meds in the first place. This displeases me and causes me to question the legal and pharmaceutical establishments even more than I already did, which is a lot. So consider this review my little blow for the revolution.Ina May Gaskin wrote the book on midwifery — four times, in fact, as the fourth edition of the book was published in 2002 and it gets longer every time. The new edition is updated with the usual stuff, including yet more stories from the parents and midwives at the Farm (including some stories from the babies, now all grown up, who were the subjects of the _original_ stories) and a new preface by Ina May. And if you’re reading this page, you don’t need me to tell you that it’s the bible of practical midwifery.What you may _not_ already know is what a spiritual book it is. Of course the title is _Spiritual Midwifery_, but some readers may be inclined to write that off as hippie jargon. As other reviewers have noted, there is some hippie jargon in the book, but I don’t think you should read “around” it or “past” it. You should read _through_ it; it’s part of the point. The medium really is sometimes the message, and this is the appropriate language for the concepts Ina May wants to lay on you.What Ina May wants you to know, what she and the midwives at the Farm have successfully shown for thirty years and counting, is that birthing really is (or can be) a sacrament and that _how we be_ has a profound effect on _how we birth_. As Stephen remarks somewhere, the Farm midwives have successfully demonstrated that _vibes are real_. This is good news and it’s important to more than birthing mothers — even to more than women.I don’t mean to minimize the importance of the practical midwifing aspects of the book, either; it’s just that I didn’t read the book for that reason myself. (I was present at the births of both of my children, but they were born in the hospital as my wife preferred.)The thing is, Ina May and Stephen are good people. In fact they manage to be both kind _and_ competent — a difficult trick and one that I certainly haven’t mastered myself. And there are lots of other good people represented in this book, in the stories and in the pictures. (The folks in the photos look like folks you’d want to meet. If you look at them right, you can actually see their souls.)So this review is partly to help spread the word about midwifery and partly to help spread the word about these good people. Vibes _are_ real, it _does_ matter how we be, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.

Review by for Spiritual Midwifery
Rating:
This is true!!! I read this book when I was pregnant with my first child in 1991, and it changed my life. I am now a doula with an BS in nursing on track to be a midwife by 2001. The 3 people, 3 fellow nursing students, who I have given copies of this book to, to help them with their birth experiences, are also persuing careers in the OB-GYN ‘field’. The 10 women that I have loaned this book to have all come back to me to confide that they too believe that there are purely physical totally sacred things that we humans must acknowledge. During their birth experience they trusted them selves because they ‘just knew, the same as the women at the farm just knew’. Every woman I have ever spoken to who had a powerful, positive birthing experience admits that they read this book before the birth and now have this book in their permanent library. Please understand that there are many people who have never read, seen or heard of ‘Spritual Midwifery’. The majority of mothers that I know have not read this book,BUT the ones who have are deeply empowered and committed to empowering more birthing mothers. OH, and get used to over coming the language-generation-gap while reading this book, it will be good practice for when you have teenagers!