Tough Questions: Talking Straight With Your Kids About the Real World

Sheila Kitzinger campaigns for women to have the information they need to make choices about childbirth. She is a strong believer in the benefits of home birth for women who are not at especially high risk. Sheila is also concerned to give a voice to pregnant women and new mothers in prison and has worked to free them from chains during birth, to keep mothers and babies together unless a woman can be shown to be a danger to her baby, and to provide woman-to-woman help to prisoners during birth.

Sheila Kitzinger lectures to midwives in many different countries. She is honorary professor at Thames Valley University and teaches the MA in midwifery in the Wolfson School of Health Sciences there. She also teaches workshops on the social anthropology of birth and breastfeeding and on unhappiness after childbirth for birth educators and postnatal counsellors, too.

Sheila Kitzinger combines birth activism with research, writing, lecturing and appearing on radio and TV. Her research includes work on women’s experiences of antenatal care, birth plans, induction of labour, epidurals, episiotomy, hospital care in childbirth, children’s experiences of being present at birth, post traumatic stress following childbirth and the many different messages that touch can give during childbirth.

Celia Kitzinger is Sheila Kitzinger’s daughter, and a social psychologist.