Accessories

a Must Read
I read several books throughout my first pregnancy, and found this one to be the most informative. There is a chapter on relaxation during the labor process (how to focus on keeping your muscles relaxed during contractions so your uterus doesn't have to fight against them) that I found to be VERY helpful. A very educational book that I highly recommend.

read this if you think natural is the ONLY way
I was ready to learn about the actual birth process at around my 6th month of pregnancy and picked this book because it looked very complete and informational. Unfortunately I came to find that it was entirely biased on the side of natural birth and that if I chose pain meds it meant I did not "value the birth". Also the information given about pain meds and giving birth in a hospital left me feeling like all my original plans for birth were not good enough. I would not recomend this to anyone looking for the unbiased facts. Read this if you already feel that natural childbirth is the ONLY way to go. This book will be very supportive of you.

Excellent Information - a little biased
I decided to wait until after I had my baby to review this book so I was speaking from experience as to whether it was helpful or not!

Overall I found this book useful and it has excellent detailed information about the birth process, drugs, interventions & womens choices during labour. I knew exactly what was happening to me & my baby during labour and I understood all of the options available to me and their potential knock on effects.

Like many of the other reviewers I found a strong bias toward a natural birth and had to take the facts at face value and ignore the authors personal preferences.

I also found the countless references to Martha's 'wonderful' birth experiences condescending and they started to annoy me after a while.

Disappointing
After reading the other reviews of this book, and another by the same authors (The Pregnancy Book), I purchased both, and am dissatisfied with both. Both books are written at about the 8th grade level, and The Birth Book is definitely written with a solid bias towards one school of birthing techniques.

There's an entire section on "interviewing OBs and deciding which hospital to have your child." For those of us with insurance plans, and a hospital five minutes away, the browbeating about how you're irresponsible and don't care enough if you don't give your OB the fifth degree before allowing him or her to do his or her job, this can be a bit off-putting.

Additionally, the focus on having a "birth plan" and "envisoning your perfect day" comes off sounding a good deal more like planning a wedding than having a baby.

While the book does a good job of presenting a variety of different options that first-time mothers (like myself) might not have considered, I found that talking with my husband's aunt, an OB nurse of 30 years' experience, to be much more calming, simply because the tone of the aunt was one of common sense, while the tone of this book is, well. . . it's hard to characterize without being disparaging, but it's a little flower-power for my tastes.

more "liberal" than most....
Dr Sears is a bit more "liberal" than most doctors and although I don't agree with everything he says, I liked the information he gave in this book. It helped ease some anxiety for me, especially since Lamaze wasn't offered at my hospital. He prefers a more natural birth, and discussed a lot of the complications and drawbacks to induction, medication, ect. I was induced and was very nervous because of what I had read in this book. My daughter was very healthy at birth, and continues to be, 9 mo. later!