Empowering Women and Families
Asheville, NC
Resources
Below is a collection of resources helpful for staying informed:
Movies
The Business of Being Born : Rikki Lake and Abby Epstein take a serious look at some of the problems with "birth as usual" in America.
Microbirth Examines the very serious consequences of unfettered cesarean delivery and gross overuse of antibiotics during labor
Why Not Home? A surprising number of doctors and nurses have their own children at home. A good documentary of the reasons why.
Websites and Organizations
The Unnecesarean : Discusses issues around the alarming cesarean rate.
The Midwives Alliance of North America : Information about midwifery and Certified Professional Midwives
Safe Home Birth : How hospitals in Portland Oregon are working to make home birth safer and hospital birth more acceptable, unlike most hospitals in the US.
Home Birth Summit : An organization working to make home birth a main stream choice.
Evidence Based Birth : A good resource for discussion of the evidence used to justify current practices. Bear in mind that evidence is only as good as the question you are using it to answer!
Cesarean Rates : A state by state compilation of hospital C-section rates by passionate maternity rights advocate Jill Arnold. If you're going the hospital route do your research and choose your hospital wisely.
Spinning Babies : Everything you want to know about your babies position, how it affects your birth and what can you do to move it.
Books
Articles
Keeping normal pregnancy out of the hands of Obstetricians? : Harvard Obstetrician Neel Shah makes the case for moving pregnancy care away from the medical model and into the hands of midwives.
New England Journal of Medicine rises to the challenge as well. : Another Neel Shah article on the excesses of medicalised prenatal care and birth.