Jeanne Faulkner - Common Sense Pregnancy: Navigating a Healthy Pregnancy and Birth for Mother and Baby

Information is the key to everything when youre pregnant. Its the key to your health, your babys health, your relationship, your sex life, your birth plans, your mother-in-law, what underwear to buy, what fish you can eateverything. Whether its your first or tenth baby, you want to know all you can about this brand-new experience. After you talk to your doctor or midwife, mother, sister, and girlfriends, like most women youll turn to books, magazines, and, more often than not, the modern mother of all resourcesthe Internet. Thats where youll find me writing FitPregnancy.coms Ask the Labor Nurse blog and global maternal health content for EveryMotherCounts.org. Im a registered nurse and pregnancy/parenting/maternal health/advice blogger whos been in the womens and maternal health business for decades. Now Im putting all my experience in one place: Common Sense Pregnancy: A Common Sense Guide on How to Be Pregnant and Have a Baby.

Making plans is an important part of pregnancy, but the best-laid plans can be conceived only with good information, lots of flexibility, and whopping doses of common sense. Even then, your plans and decisions arent entirely up to you. Theres a child involved, not to mention a partner, midwife, doctor, and family. Its complicated.

Thats where I come in. Ive spent decades working as a nurse in American hospitals, assisting with births from the most natural, low-intervention, and low-risk to the most high-risk and medically complicated, from water births to the ICU. Ive been at the bedside for thousands of labors and deliveriesand I have four kids myself. I know that every pregnancy, birth, and child is unique, but also that there are only so many variations on what works and what doesnt, whats safe and what isnt. Ive taken care of women of all ages, cultures, and demographics, and while my information is medically sound, not all of it is what youll hear from your doctor. Because Ive worked so long on the inside, I can tell you what to really expect during pregnancy and delivery. You may be surprised to learn that most of it is good news.

Ive also spent years immersed in the global maternal health world as an advocate for the international humanitarian organization CARE and as senior writer and editor for a global maternal health advocacy organization. And from this depth of experience, Ive learned a few things about what we do right here in the United States, what needs improvement, and how important common sense is during pregnancy, birth, and parenting.

The traditional U.S. medical model for maternal health care is anchored in fear and treats pregnancy and childbirth as a disease. It is complication-based and mired in legally defendable health care policies and insurance requirements that can seem scary as hell. For example, your doctor may tell you about your increased risks for certain complications and design your prenatal care and birth around those risks. Most mothers never develop most complications; nevertheless, routine prenatal and delivery care still revolve around risks. Doctors recommend routine interventions to forestall those (for most women, nonexistent) risks, but they dont always inform patients that unnecessary medical interventions have risks, too.