Rediscovering Birth

Front Cover
Pocket Books, 2001 - Family & Relationships - 256 pages
Bestselling author Sheila Kitzinger, the world's foremost birth educator and activist, explores the universal experience of pregnancy and childbirth in this splendid new book, beautifully illustrated with hundreds of photographs. With an intimate, informative style that both enlightens and engages her readers, Kitzinger looks closely at feeling and emotions in pregnancy, the physical and spiritual experience of giving birth, and the bonds that are traditionally formed between mothers and midwives. She chronicles ideas and mythologies about birth, as well as pregnancy traditions, from a magnificent array of cultures past and present -- and, with breathtaking perception and insight, explores how can we learn from them. And she focuses on the need today for vital and human connections in the birthing process, when medical procedures can overshadow the fundamental humanity of giving birth. In "Rediscovering Birth," Sheila Kitzinger enables women and their partners to make informed choicesabout how they want to live through their own unique experiences of birth and parenthood.

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Contents

4
22
A Small Miracle
30
WomantoWoman Help
96
Copyright

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About the author (2001)

Sheila Kitzinger was born Sheila Helena Elizabeth Webster in Taunton, Somerset, England on March 29, 1929. She studied social anthropology at Ruskin and St Hugh's Colleges at Oxford. As an anthropologist, she encouraged women around the world to reclaim from doctors their natural prerogative over pregnancy and childbirth. Her first book, The Experience of Childbirth, was published in 1962. Her other works included Birth over Thirty, Woman's Experience of Sex, Breastfeeding Your Baby, Ourselves as Mothers, Becoming a Grandmother, Birth Crisis, Birth and Sex: The Power and the Passion, and A Passion for Birth. She created a Birth Crisis Network in Britain, which offers reflective listening for women traumatized after delivery. She died after a short illness on April 11, 2015 at the age of 86.

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