The talk is real hippie as the women tell their birth stories in the beginning of the book, and I love the spirit of the community and women as they gather together to support each other during birth. This book is divided up into thirds: birth stories, information for the parent, information for the midwife.

This book is groundbreaking in its own right but it ended up being more of a biographical and historical account then my personal how-to guide. It's the first hand account - told by the mothers and fathers and midwives - of about 200 of the 372 births (thus far) on a giant culty hippie baby making farm in Tennessee. I reread it this week because rehearsals of my stage adaptation of the novel begin December 26 at the George Street Playhouse.

A study of home births assisted by the midwives of The Farm (Durand 1992) looked at the outcomes of 1,707 women who received care in rural Tennessee between 1971 and 1989. She is recognized as an authority on mother-led birth who caters to what the mother needs to have a positive and healthy birth. Her books have been published in several languages, including German, Italian, Hungarian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Japanese. My midwife partners and I at the The Farm learned by observation and experience that the presence of even one person who is not exquisitely attuned to the mother's feelings can stop some women's labors. Before The Farm was established, her husband Stephen was leading a speaking tour caravan in 1971, based on his philosophical seminars in San Francisco.

Obviously if a woman feels cared for and relaxed and at ease, anything, including childbirth would be easier to get through. When helping a woman through labor, Ina May Gaskin suggests avoiding giving her a rough examination that will only cause her to tense up.years of successful natural, positive, non-damaging childbirth on The Farm goes a long way toward proving that routine hospitalization of healthy laboring mothers, with its accompanying sexual assault and dehumanization, is in desperate need of re-evaluation. Her new book, Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth was released 4 March 2003 by Bantam/Dell, a division of Random House. As anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd has described in detail, underlying the technocratic mode of care of our own time is an assumption that the human body is a machine and that the female body in particular is a machine full of shortcomings and defects. So, being loving and even 'smoochy' with your partner (I personally didn't quite make it to the smoochy stage in my 8 hours of birthing) can aid the process.

However, it seems any variation from this way of "life" ,"birth", however you want to brand it, isn't preferred. Although I applaud "lay-midwives" or "direct-entry midwives" for the services they provide to people, I believe the route I'm taking will allow me to serve a greater number of people and expose them to high quality holistic health care that they may not get from your run-of-the-mill obgyn doc.They and the rest of the people on "The Farm" strongly believed in god, mentioning praying, the miracles of god, and the like. Having given birth once, I straight up don't believe another gal who says she didn't feel any pain and was thrilled to have 30 people watching.

It's worth reading if you are unfamiliar with childbirth and would like read something that is insightful but not medical in an institutional way.The book is a collection stories from various individuals at a commune with topics concerning miscarriage, childbirth, postpartum depression, c-section, breach births etc. Gaskin's own extremely premature baby died, apparently never seen by medical professionals, as Gaskin diagnosed him with "probably" something or other.