Birth Matters: A Midwife's Manifesta

International Planned Parenthood Federation, Top 6 Books of 2011

Renowned for her practice's exemplary results and low intervention rates, Ina May Gaskin has gained international notoriety for promoting natural birth. She is a much-beloved leader of a movement that seeks to stop the hyper-medicalization of birth—which has lead to nearly a third of hospital births in America to be cesarean sections—and renew confidence in a woman's natural ability to birth.

Upbeat and informative, Gaskin asserts that the way in which women become mothers is a women's rights issue, and it is perhaps the act that most powerfully exhibits what it is to be instinctually human. Birth Matters is a spirited manifesta showing us how to trust women, value birth, and reconcile modern life with a process as old as our species.

Called "the mother of authentic midwifery," INA MAY GASKIN has practiced for nearly forty years at The Farm Midwifery Center, which is noted for its low rates of intervention, morbidity and mortality. She is the only midwife for whom an obstetric maneuver has been named (the Gaskin maneuver). She lives in Tennessee.