If you think everyone's an expert when you tell them you're pregnant, wait until you make it into the bookshops and realise the choice is overwhelming. You’re tired and desperate for someone to tell you where to find that balanced perspective you've heard about.
Well, here are a few gems that appeal to a variety of women. Whether you see pregnancy and birth as fact, humour or rite of passage, you're bound to find something to meet your needs in these five wonderful books.
1) Birth: Conceiving, nurturing and giving birth to your baby.
By Catherine Price and Sandra Robinson
Birth is a guide for childbearing women written by midwife Cate Price and childbirth educator Sandra Robinson. These women also run our informative and interactive co-brand site which provides online childbirth education classes. It is great to have a childbirth book written by a practising midwife and childbirth educator. Together they have anticipated common questions women ask and provided information that is relevant and reader friendly. Birth is surprisingly objective and balanced, an aim I know the authors had.
At almost 600 pages, Birth is divided into 14 chapters and deals with most topics childbearing women would be interested in. It begins with pre-conceptual information in chapter one and ends with transition to parenthood in chapter 14.
Birth deals with emotional as well as physical issues relevant to childbearing women and their partners. It covers alternative therapies as well as conventional treatments. Punctuating the text are little segments called ''Did you know?'' These provide tantalising facts and some old wives' tales to give the book a lighter feel. At the end of the book there is a sample birth plan and labour support guide for support people involved. There is also an extensive list of support resources for women to access and suggestions for further reading. The index is remarkably detailed, making the tome much more accessible. This book is ideal for women who want in-depth, evidence-based knowledge about childbirth. It is great at last to have a childbirth book written by Australians for Australians.
2) Up the Duff: the real guide to pregnancy by Kaz Cooke
Up the Duff is a funny, yet surprisingly factual book. Only Australian comedian Kaz Cooke could treat the subject of childbirth with such irreverence and get away with it. This book is clearly different from other childbirth books on the market that treat birth more as a serious and reverent event.
Up the Duff presents the light and amusing side of pregnancy and birth, with stories of uncontrollable gas and crazy food cravings, illustrated regularly by funny cartoons. Kaz Cooke writes this pregnancy guide in the form of a diary from the perspective of Hermoine (based partly on her own experiences). It is divided into chapters that follow the weeks of pregnancy. There are also pages with questions about your own pregnancy that you can fill in week by week. From the very first page where you undertake the multiple choice pregnancy quiz, to the end where childbirth guru Penelope Leach's book is burnt for suggesting, ''a clever mother shouldn't have to get up more than once a night'', this book remains proudly irreverent. It is however surprisingly informative, in a light and simple-to-read way. If you like a laugh, this is the book for you.
For those who take pregnancy very seriously, Up the Duff may be an unsettling experience. It is not a book with everything you need to know about pregnancy but what you do read you absorb easily due to the wit and warts-and-all approach. Best of all there are no bossy rules!
3) Birthing from Within: an Extra-ordinary Guide to Childbirth preparation by Pam England and Rob Horowitz
This book is spiritual book about pregnancy and childbirth. It deals with the inner journey women make during the amazing rite of passage of birth. England is an American nurse-midwife who developed Birthing from Within in a series of birthing classes aimed at encouraging mothers to reclaim and celebrate the spiritual and emotion side of pregnancy and birth.
The book is full of exercises and activities, journal writing, meditation and painting that will help mothers to connect to their bodies and explore their feelings. My favourite chapters were those that dealt with the ''worry'' women often experience in pregnancy and the way women need to connect with other women during pregnancy — two areas we need to work on as a nuclear and highly cerebral society. There are lots of practical pieces of advice, including techniques to help cope with the pain of labour, through to how to bathe the newborn baby. This book was refreshing, warm and positive — made so by the stories, chatty writing style and illustrations.
This book is for those who want the ''I am woman hear me roar'' experience of birth along with a simple map of the childbirth landscape they will experience. This book is written by Americans for the American context but is still relevant to women in Australia.
4) Ina May's Guide to Childbirth by Ina May Gaskin
Ina May Gaskin is to midwives what David Beckham is to soccer. The difference is that Ina May lives on ''the farm'' in Tennessee where over 2000 babies have been born into the hands of the midwives she trains and works with. Ina May is famous in maternity care circles for her best-selling book Spiritual Midwifery, as well as the stunning birth statistics her community produce — these include some of the lowest intervention rates and healthiest mothers and babies in the US.
Ina May's Guide to Childbirth is no surprise to those who have read her other works. This book is basically about taking the fear out of childbirth by restoring women's faith in their own abilities to give birth with ease, less pain and less medical intervention. Ina May has long known that fear is at the heart of painful birth. This book is filled with stories of triumph over fear and tips to help prospective mothers have powerful births. Pictures scattered throughout of women giving birth with beaming smiles, reinforce the beauty of birth when unhindered by fear.
This book covers what really happens in labour and includes information on, orgasmic birth (yes it does happen!), how to avoid common birth interventions, tips for relieving labour pain naturally, negotiating the system and creating an environment for birth that helps relax and empower women. While this is an American book, the psychology of birth is a universal concept that all women can relate to. This is a beautiful practical and empowering book that will make all women rethink how they want their birth to be and how they might achieve this.
5) Childbirth without Fear by Grantly Dick-Read
Grantly Dick-Read (a UK obstetrician) is often described as the father of modern birth; and this book Childbirth without Fear is the single most influential book in the history of modern childbirth. This book is the final unabridged version, edited by the author himself shortly before he died in 1959. Republished in 2004, this book, despite its age, is in no way old or irrelevant. Endorsed by all the birth gurus alive today, with a foreword by the famous French obstetrician Michel Odent, it is a highly prominent book in the world of childbirth.
Dr Dick-Read's amazing transformation came when a poor countrywoman said to him after an unmedicated birth, ''it didn't hurt. It wasn't meant to was it doctor?'' This woman had refused to have the commonly administered chloroform of that era and gave birth without a struggle. The essence of this book is that childbirth should not be painful and that fear causes abnormal tension within the muscles in the uterus, which lead to painful cramp-like pains. The key to a pain-free birth is to stay relaxed and feel safe and supported so fear does not enter the birth process. While there are a lot of things women do not have control over, they do have control over their minds.
This book is all about learning to control the fear that is undoing modern birth. Even the contemporary practice of hypnobirthing takes its core philosophy from this basic principle of the fear-tension-pain syndrome described by Dr Dick-Read. This book is truly international, timeless and relevant to all women. It is a must!
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