“The book to read before deciding on home or hospital delivery.”
Heart & Hands: A Midwife’s Guide to Pregnancy and Birth 4th Edition by Elizabeth Davis
About the latest edition
Excerpts
Table of Contents
About midwifery & home birth
Reviews
Order
Now in it’s seventeenth printing with over 200,000 copies sold, Heart & Hands has become a classic text for aspiring midwives and parents interested in the benefits of midwifery care.
This comprehensive guide includes sections on: Schools and Institutes, Choosing a Midwife, Self-Care in Pregnancy, Birth-Assisting, Herbs and Homeopathy for the Childbearing Cycle, Setting up a Practice, Complications in Labor, and much more!
The 4th edition features updates on Group B-strep, postdates pregnancy, VBAC, and postpartum depression, plus new diagrams and photographs, updated midwifery forms, a current list of schools, and an expanded resource list for parents.
Excerpts:
From Chapter One – “What makes midwifery so desirable to women? Simply put, midwifery promotes well-being. It is an art of service, in that the midwife recognizes, responds to and cooperates with natural forces. In this sense, midwifery is ecologically attuned, involving the wise utilization of resources and respect for the balance of nature.
“Midwifery care is personalized care. Despite parameters of safety the midwife upholds, she recognizes wellness as an amorphous state with periodic deviations from normal; her task is to decipher the unique and fluid patterns of each mother’s well-being. The more thorough and continuous her care, the more likely she will be to detect a complication at its inception. And the better she and the mother communicate, the more readily will they develop and implement a solution.”
Enjoy highly technical material presented in a clear and entertaining fashion: “Sometimes you get the feeling that active labor is knocking at the door, but the mother is not ready to get up and answer. Up to four or five centimeters dilation (and sometimes beyond), women have the power to control the ebb and flow of contractions and, unless labor is precipitous, must deliberately let the forces of birth take over. To move into active labor, the mother must give up notions of how labor is “supposed” to be.
“As Michel Odent reminds us, the act of giving birth is seated in the primitive brain, which releases of a “cocktail of hormones” to ease the way. To benefit from this and tune into our instinctual birthing wisdom, we must first turn off the neocortex, our thinking/reasoning aspect. And how is this to be done? Consider factors that stimulate the neocortex: speech, bright light, and a sense of being observed (by others, by technology, or by oneself). Laboring women need a quiet, peaceful, private and intimate environment—with their birth attendant knitting quietly in the corner, or in the other room! This is not sentimentalism; this is physiology.”
Heart & Hands: Table of Contents
Did you know that:
- In the European countries of Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands, birthing with midwives is the popular norm.
- In the six countries in the world that lose the fewest babies, the majority of births are assisted by midwives.
- In the US, where the midwife has been marginalized, infant mortality is alarmingly high–we rank number
26 worldwide. - Complication rates for hospital birth have been shown repeatedly to be about six times greater than for birth at home.
- The physician lobby has repeatedly funded anti-midwifery acts of legal
harassment and negative media campaigns. - Midwives today ascribe to high standards of professional practice.
“Here is a book of great beauty, that uniquely combines traditional midwifery teachings with the most up-to-date obstetrical theories and techniques.”
–Don Creevy, M.D. FACOG, Clinical Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Stanford University School of
Medicine
“An impressive and deeply caring book…reveals a shrewd and compassionate sensitivity to women’s needs in pregnancy and birth.”
–Sheila Kitzinger, author, The Complete Book of Pregnancy and Birth, The Midwife Challenge
To Order
Heart & Hands: A Midwife’s Guide to Pregnancy and Birth 4th Edition by Elizabeth Davis, Celestial Arts Publishing/10 Speed Press
Find it on: Amazon
