Birth
A History
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
The engaging and eye-opening story of how we and our ancestors entered the world.
Through the frigid, blurry January weeks after George was born, I found myself suddenly housebound with time to ruminate - though not time to cook or take a shower. When George was peaceful, my mind returned to that nagging question: why is birth so hit and miss after all this time? I needed to put into perspective my own experience. I needed to know what other women, in other cultures, in other times had done.
Birth is a book that will open the eyes of even the most informed experts on the subject. Cassidy looks at every aspect of childbirth - from fathers and mothers to doctors and widwives across the centuries - with admirable objectivity in a work that is utterly gripping, occasionally shocking and essential reading for the human race.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Anyone who has taken a prenatal education class in the last decade can detail much of what Boston Globe reporter Cassidy documents about birthing battles in her enjoyable new book. What she so cogently adds is a history of Western practices and attitudes surrounding birth, from the "God-sibs" (or "gossips") who sat by a woman's bed in Europe and early America to the scheduled cesarean of today. The book is well written and will be an important eye-opener to many. Cassidy works hard to remain neutral, but a preference for the discourse of "natural" birth creeps in. She looks nostalgically back at times when most women gave birth at home with female midwives in attendance. This leads to some problematic moments, as when she wants to argue that, historically, birth was not the danger to women's lives that many today assume. But then she has to admit that pioneer women wrote their wills before giving birth and that most women who die in childbirth today are in the non-Western world, where they lack access to hospitals. This is, by Cassidy's admission, the work of a woman disappointed by her own birthing experience. But that, too, is a product of our time the idea that we "deserve" a certain experience as we give birth.
