Book Review:Natural Hospital Birth

I was super excited to read this book. My doula recommended it to me knowing that I am a high-risk mother who wants to birth in the hospital, but also wants a natural child birth if at all possible.

 Ms. Gabriel is a very experienced doula, as well as a medical anthropologist, so she obviously knows a thing or two about birthing babies! She pulls from her experiences both here in the US as well as her time in Russia when discussing ways to prepare yourself and your health team for a natural birth.

There are a few GREAT things about this book:
First, it discusses the importance of writing a birth plan tailored to you, far beyond the "check the box" templates you will find on many baby websites. She also discusses the importance of being respectful but firm with medical professionals, who in the US are mostly experienced in births with medical interventions.
Next, she introduces several tools to help you work with medical staff, and tricks to help avoid medical interventions.
Finally, she does a great job breaking down things you can do in each stage of labor in order to make the whole thing less scary and painful. Aka: early labor at home, drink a glass of wine, and sleep (yes, please!).
She does all of this while admitting and encouraging moms to remember that not everything can always go to plan, and sometimes medical interventions are, in fact, necessary (especially in high-risk situations).

Now, I did struggle with a few things in this book:
As a reminder: I am a medical professional. And that is where most of my issues with this book come from.
She paints most medical professionals in a bad light. Either they are too stubborn (doing things based on when it is convenient for them), or they are simply naive to the wonderful world of natural child birth.
Also, there are certain times when medical intervention is, in fact, necessary for good outcomes. These seem to be breezed over to the point where some are completely disregarded. I thought this gave a false sense of security to mothers who might not be a medically savvy as myself that when professionals recommend interventions, they are doing it for the reasons listed above. There are a couple of times when she is very praising of medical professionals, but it felt very "them vs. us" even though she repeatedly states the importance of birth being a TEAM process.

Overall, I thought it was a good book, but could definitely have been less biased. I was hoping for something more research based, and this was not that. If you are pretty confident you are interested in a natural birth, I highly recommend it, but if you are on the fence, I would wait until you've done some research on both sides before picking this bad boy up.

Happy Reading!