Real Birth: Women Share Their Stories - Softcover

Greene, Robin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0965449939 ISBN 13: 9780965449939

Publisher: Windows on History Pr Inc, 2000

Synopsis

Intimate and intensely personal, the 36 first-person narratives contained in Real Birth: Women Share Their Stories offer readers a window into the complex and emotionally exciting experience of childbirth. Women from a full range of socioeconomic backgrounds and circumstances recount the childbirth choices theyve made and the ways those choices have played themselves out in the real life contexts of their everyday lives. Readers meet women from all over the country who speak to us directlyno interviewer intrudes, no judgements intrude, and no single method of childbirth is advocated. Instead, these women offer us their candid experiences, presented clearly and unflinchingly.

Medically reviewed by family practice physician Dr. Richard Randolph, Real Birth offers readers a plethora of correct information as wellthe kind of real scoop that other books and health care professionals are often reluctant to reveal. The result is a book that reaches across the boundaries of current childbirth literature.

Real Birth is introduced by Ariel Gore, author of The Hip Mamas Survival Guide, and contains an afterword by Grey Brown, author of Staying In. Also included are an extensive glossary of medical terms, a thoroughly researched selective bibliography, and a list of resources of interest to pregnant women.

About this title

From the Publisher:

Generation Books was created in 1999 to give voice to the body-and-soul-changing experiences of womens lives. We are dedicated to publishing books that feature rich and diverse first-person accounts of such transformative events as childbirth, illness and recovery, marriage, divorce, starting over at midlife, even rape and the return to wholeness.

Our first book, Real Birth: Women Share Their Stories by Robin Greene, is a collection of 36 edited interviews with women who speak candidly about their birthing experiences.

Greene explains: After having my first baby, I realized that women share their birthing stories the way men share their war stories, and I began looking for books where I could find the war stories of other women. When I couldnt find such a book, I was inspired to create it myself.

Greene has made good on her inspiration. Real Birth gives eloquent voice to various and varied experiences of giving birth.

While there are existing books that provide accounts of the birthing process from the health professionals point of view, until Real Birth the most important voicesthose of the women themselveswere noticeably absent from the shelves of pregnancy and parenting books. Real Birth is the first book to provide a place where those interested in the birthing experience can meet on the printed page and find community. The stories involve rich women, poor women, husbands, friends, OB/GYNs, midwives, doulas, birthing coaches, multiple births, Cesareans, loss, grief, pain, and joy. These stories give access to voices and experiences that are not always heard.

Real Birth, in offering specific examples of how childbirth choices play themselves out in real life, is sure to become an important resource for childbearing women and perinatal health professionals alike. The unique features of Real Birth are those that will be nurtured in all the books published by Generation:

--First-person accounts of the life experiences that transform womens bodies and souls; --A sense of community on the printed page that is welcoming and rich in diversity; --Insights into the physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of these life-changing events that provide a resource not only to women experiencing such events, but also to the health professionals working with them.

From the Inside Flap:

Collected in this volume are the first-person narratives of thirty-six women whose childbirth experiences represent a range of real-life experiences. These emotionally and psychologically revealing stories offer readers the opportunity to see for themselves what childbirth is really like. The women in REAL BIRTH give birth to their intimate and private selves at the threshold of motherhood.

About this edition

• Publisher: Windows on History Pr Inc
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0965449939
• ISBN 13: 9780965449939
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 227