Product Review Gifts for Mom: Your Best Birth

I’ve been doing a lot of product reviews lately, in part because I have been inundated with items that people have sent me to look over. The book by Ricki Lake and Abby Epstein pictured here, entitled Your Best Birth: Know All Your Options, Discover the Natural Choices, and Take Back the Birth Experience, took me a while to get through. This is not a bad thing – the book is just very dense and full of information.

I have read about 100+ parenting and pregnancy books at this point, and the second half of this one had some information new to me. The first half is largely exposition, setting up the birth options that are out there, explaining the trend towards hospital stays and C-sections, and describing other birthing options. I liked the way the information was presented there because it was not pushy (a rare thing in pregnancy books), but it wasn’t necessarily anything new. What *was* unique was the second half of the book that went into great detail on the practices and expertise of midwives and doulas.

I think a lot of people are interested in using a midwife and a doula, but do not necessarily know exactly what they do, how it is different from a doctor, how having a doctor can complement their work, and what else the midwives and doulas bring to the birth experience that will not be there if they are not there. The emphasis is my own, because that is truly the point: midwives and doulas bring something to the birth process that is not replicated in a hospital/doctor/nurse setting. That is what you are paying them for – that extra dimension.

This distinction is a fine one, but important – I think that it is a mistake to cast midwives and doulas as “alternatives to doctors”. This book does not do that, and in fact, they excel at incorporating throughout the text different tips and tricks from midwives and doulas that really emphasize how unique and useful they are. This focus on providing examples and details is the great strength of Your Best Birth and its unique contribution to the pregnancy literature field. My only criticism is that I felt there were a couple moments where the medical risks of home births were downplayed or left out of a storyline. This book tries to have a documentary feel to it, since it is the byproduct of a documentary on birthing in the United States, and – for me at least – that raised my expectations about the balance of information vs. interpretation that I expected to see. For some of the home birth stories, the glossing over of some of the medical realities deviated from the book’s more objective tone.

That criticism aside, this book has a friendly, conversational manner that presents some new and much-needed information on midwives and doulas that is worth reading. Available on Kindle as an e-book or as a regular book on Amazon, it is a good investment for first-time moms and moms who are wanting to understand how to make a second or third birth experience a little more customized that their first.

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Tagged as: birth experience, birth options, birth process, doctor nurse, doula, midwife, midwives, pregnancy books