books and other resources on pregnancy, birth, babies, & breastfeeding

pregnancy & birth

Mainstream childbirth-preparation books (most famously What to Expect When You’re Expecting) tend to medicalize pregnancy and childbirth in ways that can cause unnecessary fear and prove disempowering to readers. Pregnancy and childbirth certainly can go wacky and require medical intervention and extra care, but there’s no way a book is going to predict whether and how that will happen in any individual case. Your provider is on the lookout for problems and all things pathologic (from fairly common to extremely rare), but our medical system does a crap job of understanding, foregrounding, and supporting normal, healthy pregnancy and birth. From my perspective, what we need as we start out is a firm understanding of the normal, healthy process–something not widely available in our culture, unfortunately–so that we can add on from there as necessary with the help of our midwives or obstetricians (whom we’ve chosen with care).

I would recommend starting out by reading, cover-to-cover and with your partner if you have one and he or she is willing, Penny Simkin’s The Birth Partner (3rd ed.). Its title and subtitle sound as though it’s just a book for fathers-to-be and doulas, or for people who are hiring doulas, but I really really wish I’d read it when I was first learning about birth before and during my pregnancy. Simkin lays out the basics in a realistic, clear, and birth-positive way. I particularly wish I’d known about this book as a way to understand cesarean sections (which I feared intensely) from a low-scare-factor, straightforward source, just in case we ended up in that situation. I was simply physically incapable of watching the cesarean video that was played in my childbirth education class, but I could have read this chapter.

Our Bodies, Ourselves: Pregnancy and Birth takes a birth-positive, woman-centered, genuinely diversity-aware approach that I really appreciate. In the part about sexuality during pregnancy, we don’t just get the occasional “partner” instead of “husband” or “him or her”–we get a picture of a lesbian couple. The book doesn’t just avoid assuming that every pregnant woman is a middle-class white woman romantically involved with the father of her child and probably preparing to be a stay-at-home-mom; it also includes the stories and voices of single mothers, teenage mothers, economically disadvantaged mothers, etc., etc. Our Bodies, Ourselves started out with a groundbreaking, empowering women’s health book in 1970. They have great information (including excerpts) online and loads more in the book. I like it, I’ve heard only good things about it, and it’s affordable and much more manageably-sized than a lot of the Big Books of Pregnancy.

If you want to read birth stories, I’d encourage you to consider Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth rather than turning to the crazies on the internet (myself and my readers excepted, of course!). About halfway through my pregnancy I had the admittedly obvious realization that people with horror stories are a lot more likely to go online and write about them than are people who had nice chill births and are busy enjoying and happily breastfeeding their babies. Again, although stories of similar experiences can be deeply helpful and validating if you’ve already had a tough experience, there’s no point obsessing over each catastrophe that could but probably will not befall you. The stories in Gaskin’s book are pretty much all hippified, cabin-in-the-woods, on-all-fours sorts of births (all unmedicated, I believe). But, in a way, that makes them extra-enlightening even if you’ll be in a more technological environment, because they show the basic process unfolding in various ways. I like how they imply the huge range of “normal” and safe, too.

Excellent online resources include:

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A good, reasonably brief breastfeeding book is The Nursing Mother’s Companion (revised ed.). It’s positive and empowering, rather than emphasizing everything that can go wrong or implying that problems are your fault.

I also strongly recommend Laura Keegan’s Breastfeeding with Comfort and Joy, truly an amazing book in terms of both use-value and aesthetics. Its many black-and-white photos aren’t just technical (how to fit Part A into Hole B, or rather how to bring Hole B onto Part A). They express some of the awe and love and deep emotion of the nursing experience. They are, in fact, loving photographs. They show whole people, whole intimate nursing dyads and families, who look beautiful and comfortable while breastfeeding–rather than, as in so many parenting books and magazines and pamphlets, disconnected body parts framed in clinical and unbeautiful ways. The book includes lots of useful advice on the technical stuff (latch technique and so forth) in simple, easy-to-understand-and-remember ways, and it’s well-organized. But what recommends it most to me is its empathetic and aesthetic approach to the experience of breastfeeding.

Excellent online resources include:

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Excellent online resources include: