Sarah Buckley - Gentle Birth, Gentle Mothering: A Doctors Guide to Natural Childbirth and Gentle Early Parenting Choices

Copyright 2009 by Sarah Buckley
www.sarahjbuckley.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except brief excerpts for the purpose of review, without written permission of the publisher.

Celestial Arts
an imprint of Ten Speed Press
PO Box 7123
Berkeley, California 94707
www.tenspeed.com

Distributed in Canada by Ten Speed Press Canada, in Australia by Simon & Schuster Australia, in New Zealand by Southern Publishers Group, in South Africa by Real Books, and in the United Kingdom and Europe by Publishers Group UK.

A version of was first published in the Courier Mail (Brisbane, Australia), 7 May 1998, as Breastfeeding and Bonding; a version of the essay Bees, Baboo and Boobies: My Breastfeeding Career was first published as My Breastfeeding Career in The Mother (UK) 2004, no. 10; a version of Ten Tips for Safe Cosleeping was previously published in Natural Parenting no. 4, Spring 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Buckley, Sarah J.
Gentle birth, gentle mothering : a doctors guide to natural childbirth and gentle early parenting choices / Sarah Buckley; foreword by Ina May Gaskin.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-83203-0
1. Natural childbirth. 2. Newborn infantsCare. I. Title.

RG661.B83 2009
618.45dc22

2008043685

v3.1

For mothers, babies, fathers,
and families everywhere.

HOORAY FOR Sarah Buckley! Her broadly informed, authoritative voice is sorely needed in these trying times when there is so much fear, ignorance, and confusion surrounding childbirth and the decision-making and organization of maternity care. Never has there been so much at stake for women giving birth, in terms of age-old knowledge and wisdom that may be lost for decades or longer if current trends continue unabated. In many countries, it is only the middle-aged and the elderly who remember the time when only four or five women out of every hundred had their babies by cesarean. How will people of the future even know that un-interfered-with birth is safer than surgical birth? Will feminists of the future believe todays birth activists, or will they believe the obstetricians who are far more comfortable with surgery than with physiological processes that have their own timing?

Fear can make for irrational decision-making, and here we have a good example of this phenomenon at work. In many areas of the world, women have become sufficiently afraid of natures plan for labor and birth that they are literally clamoring for surgical birth when there is no medical reason to justify the added risk such surgery poses to them and their babies. There is no historical precedent for a phenomenon such as this. We have mass hysteria spreading over the planeta rather strange development after the second wave of the womens movement, since it involves women being afraid of their own wombs. Ironically, this widespread fear leads countless women to agree to deliberate injury of their uteri by cesarean section, although we dont commonly speak of these acts in such stark language. Women, like most of the rest of our society, are not given the information necessary to fully understand the risks of many of the decisions they are called upon to make around the time of birth. While all this happens, the confusion grows even deeper, and it becomes ever more difficult for young women to learn about the gifts and capacities of their bodies.

Horrible birth stories can now be sent around the world at lightning speed via satellite television and movies, with the result that uninformed attitudes (many of which arose originally in the United States) that promote ever more routine medical intervention in birth for healthy women are threatening to make the ancient way of birth viewed as a selfish or irresponsible act on the part of the woman who wishes to make this choice.