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Book Review – “Your Best Birth” by Ricki Lake

by on Nov.11, 2010, under Non Fiction

Check out this great review of the book “Your Best Birth” by Ricki Lake – a guest post by Joy Paley.

Being only 6 weeks pregnant with my first child (and an admitted overachiever), I picked up Your Best Birth. I was simultaneously excited about my pregnancy and already overwhelmed by the options. My mom, an ex-hippie who used a midwife with all her children, is strongly in favor of an at-home birth. While I’ve got a little of this au natural bent myself, I’m also a realist and scared of anything going wrong for me or my baby. Since the subtitle of this book is “Know All Your Options, Discover the Natural Choices, and Take Back the Birth Experience,” I hoped this book would help me understand my choices as a soon-to-be mom, and it definitely did.

The book is written by Ricki Lake (yep, the former daytime talk show host) and Abby Epstein, the director of the recent film The Business of Being Born. The book is arranged into four sections, titled “Know Your Options,” “Putting Your Dream Team Together,” “Interventions: the Slippery Slope,” and “Take Back Your Birth.” The book’s aim is to show American women how we go about birth here, and that it doesn’t necessarily need to be this way.

What do I mean by “this way”? Well, the book opens by describing a hypothetical birth in your standard American hospital. While I “knew” what birth is like there (I’ve been with my sister during the birth of her children), putting myself in this hypothetical situation really opened my eyes. The hospital setting is so clinical and removed. Duh, you’re saying, of course it is, it’s a hospital. That’s its job! And you’re right, but one of the main questions of the book, “what kind of birth do you want?” made me question how ideal such a situation would be for me.

I was a little on-guard at the beginning of the part about the hospital birth. I was worried that it was a scare tactic to show me how horrendous hospital births are, but it didn’t read like that at all. The narrative voice is very even and didn’t feel preachy. The down to earth, woman-to-woman tone makes the advice accessible and not like orders you have to follow to be a good mom.

I think most women, even those who very seriously doubt that they will have an out-of-hospital birth, can benefit from this approach. Why? At its most basic, the book is a manual for empowering yourself as an expectant mother. The message isn’t that home birth is “right” and hospital is “wrong,” but to determine what you need to have the best labor you possibly can. Their advice for finding the best birth team for you is practical and helpful, and it doesn’t just include doulas and midwives, but also how to also find the type of OB/Gyn and hospital for your specific labor needs.

If you’re expecting, this book has something to offer you, even if you feel sure that you’ll need a C-section or hospital birth. It’s not a 1960s manual on how to have your baby in a field of wildflowers; it’s a well-researched but down-to-earth guide on ensuring that childbirth is how and where you want it to be.

Joy Paley is a guest blogger for An Apple a Day and a writer on the subject of becoming a medical transcriptionist for the Guide to Health Education.


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More Book Reviews….
The Hunt by Muffy Morrigan
Wedding Journals & Keepsake Gifts by Tammy Kushnir

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