Open Season - A Survival Guide for Natural Childbirth and VBAC in the 90s

For counselor Nancy Wainer Cohen, this book is the sibling to Silent Knife: Cesarean Prevention and Vaginal Birth after Cesarean (Bergin & Garvey, 1983) her critically-acclaimed expose on America's growing reliance on cesarean sections. Open Season provides fresh insights and new information on the subject, offering guidance to childbearing couples, educators, health professionals, and scholars who value the natural path of childbirth.

Readers will find this book timely, informative, shocking, irreverent, and extremely readable. Cohen's intimate writing style presents a compendium of knowledge on childbirth in the fashion of a personal letter. Her aim is to lower America's alarming reliance on cesarean section, which is currently at 25 percent of all births, and to return the responsibility for childbirth to women by encouraging them to choose the kind of birthing experience they wish to have. In addition to cesarean section, Cohen discusses many other generally unnecessary interventions performed on women during pregnancy and childbirth--such as fetal monitoring and routinized hospital procedures.

List of contents

Introduction
Hello Again!
The Cutting Edge
Open Season?
Caught, Red-Handed!: The Status of Cesarean Section in the United States, Revisited
Voices, Lowered
Birthcrap! Interfearences and Interveintions, Once More
My Aching Feet
Bless the Beasts
Divine Nonintervention
Hospitals: Cesarean Baby Factories
"The Tears Are the Healing"
Learning as We Live! Childbirth Classes in the 1990s
Birth!
Not for VBACs Only
Voices Raised!: Starfish
Open Season!
Postscript
Afterword by Ester B. Zorn
Appendix 1: Values Clarification
Appendix 2: Addresses
References
Index

About the author

Nancy Wainer Cohen

Product details

• Authors: Nancy Wainer Cohen, Nancy Wainer Cohen
• Publisher: Bloomsbury
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 18.10.1991
• EAN: 9780897892520
• ISBN: 978-0-89789-252-0
• Subjects: Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Medicine > General; HEALTH & FITNESS / Pregnancy & Childbirth, MEDICAL / Gynecology & Obstetrics, MEDICAL / Reproductive Medicine & Technology, MEDICAL / Nursing / Maternity, Perinatal, Women's Health, FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / Life Stages / Infants & Toddlers, Reproductive Medicine, Pregnancy, birth & baby care, Gynaecology and obstetrics, Gynaecology & obstetrics, Pregnancy, birth and baby care: advice and issues, Birthing methods, Current Events and Issues: Health and Medicine