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Describes childbirth customs in different cultures throughout history.

• Eve's doing : birth from antiquity through the Middle Ages
• Men with tools : forceps use from 1600s to 1800s
• Slave women's contribution to gynecology
• Dying to give birth : maternal mortality into the twentieth century
• Leaving home : New York's lying-in and the growth of maternity wards
• Birth is but a sleep and forgetting
• What was she thinking? : Freud meets fertility
• It's only natural
• Toxic advice and a deadly drug : DES
• From kitchen-table surgery to the art of the C-section
• Freebirthers
• Womb with a view
• Sperm shopping
• The big chill.

Making and having babies what it takes to get pregnant, stay pregnant, and deliver has mystified women and men for the whole of human history. The birth gurus of ancient times told newlyweds that simultaneous orgasms were necessary for conception and that during pregnancy a woman should drink red wine but not too much and have sex but not too frequently. Over the last one hundred years, depending on the latest prevailing advice, women have taken morphine, practiced Lamaze, relied on ultrasound images, sampled fertility drugs, and shopped at sperm banks. In Get Me Out, the insatiably curious Randi Hutter Epstein journeys through history, fads, and fables, and to the fringe of science, where audacious researchers have gone to extreme measures to get healthy babies out of mothers. Here is an entertaining must-read and an enlightening celebration of human life.".
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

The Ship of Birth records a father's responses in the time immediately before and after the birth of his child. Just as material significant to the dead is placed in a ship of death, so this ship of birth contains what is significant to the child: the wonder and trepidation of the parents, the nature of the soul, the future growth of the child. Greg Delanty's poems draw on his experiences in American and Irish cultures, using the traditional verse structures of seventeenth-century religious poets along with open modern colloquial forms to evoke the subtle interconnections of the past and future. Without sentimentality or self-indulgence, Delanty acknowledges the dark and difficult reality that the child faces, while affirming the sustaining continuity of life.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Pregnant women have always dreaded the pain of childbirth and have done just about anything to avoid feeling it. Five thousand years ago, the Egyptians and Indians made use of opium, from which we would later derive morphine. The Greeks chewed willow bark, the predecessor to aspirin. The people of the Andes had their cocoa leaves, the basis for cocaine. And myrrh might not have been just for the baby Jesus. Women have drunk wine and poppy juice, eaten mandrake and hemp. They've been hypnotized, offered Demerol, Nubain, and Stadol. Drugs aside, many in myth and reality have sworn they would give up anything to avoid the agony of childbirth. Even sex. The Greek goddess Actemia was terrified by her mother's suffering at her own birth and so she asked Zeus the favor of eternal virginity. Actemia changed her mind though, seduced Endymion, and ended up giving birth to fifty daughters. Mere mortals, also unable to resist the lures of sex, have eaten strange things--including cassowary anus or swamp eel, hoping to make the birth canal slippery--to reduce the pain.... Indigenous peoples, from Siberia to the Sudan, would demand confessions from the woman in labor. Did she commit adultery? If she did not answer truthfully, they believed, her birth would be extremely painful.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Maps Acknowledgments Note on Transliteration Prologue: Birth on the Threshold Introduction: Childbirth and Modernity in Tamil Nadu
• 1. The Professionalization of Obstetrics in Colonial India: The "Problem" of Childbirth in Colonial Discourse
• 2. Maternal and Child Health Services in the Postcolonial Era
• 3. Bangles of Neem, Bangles of Gold: Pregnant Women as Auspicious Burdens
• 4. Invoking Vali: Painful Technologies of Birth
• 5. Moving Targets: The Routinization of IUD Insertions in Public Maternity Wards
• 6. "Baby Friendly" Hospitals and Bad Mothers: Maneuvering Development during the Postpartum Period Conclusion: Reproductive Rights, "Choices, " and Resistance Epilogue
• Appendix I. Sample Questionnaires for Interviews
• Appendix II. Official Structure of Maternal-Child Health Care Institutions and Practitioners in Tamil Nadu, 1995 Glossary Notes Bibliography Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Arguing that the global spread of biomedical models of childbirth has not brought forth one monolithic form of "modern birth", this text focuses on the birth experiences of lower-class women in Southern India and reveals the complex ways in which modernity emerges in local contexts.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)
Even childbirth is affected by globalization - and in India, as elsewhere, the trend is away from home births, assisted by midwives, toward hospital births with increasing reliance on new technologies. And yet, as this work of critical feminist ethnography clearly demonstrates, the global spread of biomedical models of childbirth has not brought forth one monolithic form of 'modern birth'. Focusing on the birth experiences of lower-class women in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, "Birth on the Threshold" reveals the complex and unique ways in which modernity emerges in local contexts. Through vivid description and animated dialogue, this book conveys the birth stories of the women of Tamil Nadu in their own voices, emphasizing their critiques of and aspirations for modern births today. In light of these stories, author Cecilia Van Hollen explores larger questions about how the structures of colonialism and postcolonial international and national development have helped to shape the form and meaning of birth for Indian women today. Ultimately, her book poses the question: How is gender - especially maternity - reconfigured as birth is transformed?
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Women, birth and power-- Kitty - ruptured membranes-- Cindy - an "accidental" natural birth-- Susan - birth/death-- Shelley - a three generation birth-- Joanne - a planned caesarean birth-- Laura - infection, induction and intensive care-- Karen - a five-day labour-- Hannah - joyful home birth-- Mary - childbirth and violence against women-- Emily - premature labour and birth-- Kim - vaginal birth after caesarean-- Ariel - pain or pleasure?-- Aaria, Sandy and Teresa - twins!-- Elaine and Janet - meconium aspiration and shoulder dystocia-- Rebecca - teen mom-- Linda - birth among family and friends-- Anna - postpartum haemorrhage-- Penny - holding back-- Sally - a woman-chosen pitocin induction-- Lynn - gestational diabetic-- Tammy - stuck at eight.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

From her vantage point as a birth attendant, the author recounts the birth experiences of 20 different women. The reader learns that there are no "right" or "wrong" ways to give birth. In fact, the author shows how satisfying it can be for women to exercise their own power of choice in the birth process instead of yielding to unnecessary technological and medical interventions. Birth, she says, is a process of wellness, not illness. Hence, most women don't need medication to help them deal with normal birth pains if they yield to the strength within their own bodies, and if they have the proper support during labour. When women give birth in a comfortable setting of their choice, the medical wrongs against them, committed in hospitals in the name of safety and technology, are prevented. In the face of opposition from an entrenched segment of the medical establishment, Dwinell dares the view that hospital care should not be routine but should be given only with good reason and the women's permission. For pregnant women and their partners, "Birth Stories" makes a convincing argument that under normal circumstances each woman's intuitive knowledge and individual resources can help her to labour and give birth successfully in her own way. Nurses, midwives, doctors, and birth educators will find it useful to realise that there are many ways to give birth ...that it is important for the family to be together and make their own choices ...and that pregnant women can have safe births without excessive medical intervention. Finally, "Birth Stories" also serves as a guide to those professionals who are seeking a woman-centred birth model for their institutions.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)