On The Shelf

Birthing Fathers: The Transformation Of Men In American Rites Of Birth
by Richard K. Reed

Publisher's Description:

"Birthing Fathers is a groundbreaking anthropological and sociological analysis of American fatherhood and men’s role in birthing."

— Robbie Davis-Floyd, author of Birth as an American Rite of Passage

"Treating birth as ritual, Reed makes clever use of his anthropological expertise, qualitative data, and personal experience to bring to life the frustrations and joys men often encounter as they navigate the medical model of birthing."

— William Marsiglio, author Sex, Men, and Babies: Stories of Awareness and Responsibility

In the past two decades, men have gone from being excluded from the delivery room to being admitted, then invited, and, finally, expected to participate actively in the birth of their children. No longer mere observers, fathers attend baby showers, go to birthing classes, and share in the intimate, everyday details of their partners’ pregnancies.

In this unique study, Richard Reed draws on the feminist critique of professionalized medical birthing to argue that the clinical nature of medical intervention distances fathers from child delivery. He explores men’s roles in childbirth and the ways in which birth transforms a man’s identity and his relations with his partner, his new baby, and society. In other societies, birth is recognized as an important rite of passage for fathers. Yet, in American culture, despite the fact that fathers are admitted into delivery rooms, little attention is given to their transition to fatherhood.

The book concludes with an exploration of what men’s roles in childbirth tell us about gender and American society. Reed suggests that it is no coincidence that men’s participation in the birthing process developed in parallel to changing definitions of fatherhood more broadly. Over the past twenty years, it has become expected that fathers, in addition to being strong and dependable, will be empathetic and nurturing.

Well-researched, candidly written, and enriched with personal accounts of over fifty men from all parts of the world, this book is as much about the birth of fathers as it is about fathers in birth.











Birth as an American Rite of Passage
by Robbie Davis-Floyd

From Library Journal:

Davis-Floyd has written a brilliant feminist analysis of childbirth rites of passage in American culture. These rites, she argues, take away women's power over their bodies, naturally designed to bring life into the world, and for no physiological reason give it to the medical system. She believes that society, intimidated by women's ability to give birth, has designed obstetrical rituals that are far more complex than natural childbirth itself in order to deliver what is from nature into culture. "In this way," she writes, "society symbolically demonstrates ownership of its product." This beautiful book, full of insightful interviews with women on a range of birth experiences and with an extensive bibliography, is a wonderful addition to the growing literature on the anthropology of the body and the theoretical debates over mind/body and nature/culture dichotomies. Essential for all anthropology and women's studies collections and medical school libraries and highly recommended for public libraries.

- Patricia Sarles, Mt. Sinai Medical Ctr. Lib., New York

"[Davis-Floyd] is a respectful listener who has encouraged her subjects to speak honestly about a complex experience. Consequently, even skeptical readers of the fascinating stories she has gathered should be prompted to reflect on the meaning of their own or their partners' experience of birth. . . . I admire, without reservation, the generous, critical, passionate spirit that animates this book."

- Sara Ruddick, New York Times Book Review

Amazon.ca reviews:

Necessary reading
October 16, 2005
Reviewer: Doulawoman (Oklahoma City OK)

If you really want to know what to expect when you're expecting, read this book and Henci Goer's Thinking Woman's Guide to a Better Birth. If you'd really like to remove yourself from the technobirth machine, read Ina May Gaskin's Ina May's Guide to Childbirth and Spiritual Midwifery. If you've always thought you might want a natural birth, read Peggy O'Mara's Having a Baby, Naturally. And remember this one thing: If you really (really) want a natural, unmedicated birth, don't give birth in a hospital.

Wonderful and thoughtful reading experience!
October 10, 2000
Reviewer: Christina B Morrow "christinaburden" (Galveston, Texas United States)

If you are a woman looking for a thoughtful review of our modern birthing culture this is a wonderful book. I have read a lot about birth options, perspectives of the birth experience, and midwifery history and philosophy but went away wanting for more. My desire to really explore an informed text about our birthing culture was finally satiated by this book. I am not an anthropologist by training and yet found the book accessible, educational, and challenging. I really suggest this book be read by everyone interested in the birth experience, partners, attendants, birthing woman, or children of technocracy.

---

Sweet Home Birth Boxes - the supplies you need no matter what your birth plan includes!

Reflection

• Can you think of any North American birth rites?

• Would you say that fear of birth could be related to the types of birth rites that are prevalent in our culture?

• Women often compare "horror stories" after birth - in what way is this a rite of passage?

• What little rituals do you practice in your daily life to help you get through tough moments?

• What can you do to honour the transition to motherhood?

Post your comments and answers...

---

Sweet Home Birth Boxes - the supplies you need no matter what your birth plan includes!

When is a midwife not a midwife?

by DAVID BERLIN
for the Globe & Mail

Obstructed Labour: Race and Gender in the Re-Emergence of Midwifery
By Sheryl Nestel
UBC Press, 220 pages, $29.95

For the past quarter of a century, Sheryl Nestel, who teaches sociology at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, has been a prenatal educator and a leader in the movement to de-medicalize and humanize childbearing. She has lectured and published papers fiercely critical of physicians, who have, in her view, monopolized the birthing experience, sanitized it and, in many cases, opted for caesarean sections for no better reason than to ensure that the doctor can get to the golf course on time.

While Nestel has argued against the temptation to fetishize natural childbirth, she has always maintained that women must be granted the right to choose between the hospital and the home environment. Like many of her peers, Nestel has railed against the government agencies that have, since the mid-1970s, forced midwives to skulk about in dark corridors like the abortionists of old.
But in this daring and insightful book, Nestel has made an about-face. Rather than sustain her attack on the medical establishment -- which, despite the fact that midwifery is now legal in Ontario, is still working hard to co-opt midwives into mainstream medicine -- she has turned her powerful analytical talents and considerable investigative skills against the Ontario Association of Midwifery (OAM), an institution with which she shares many values and beliefs. As a result of her efforts, the OAM ends up at the centre of a scandal so embarrassing that it is hard to imagine how its board of directors can do anything but resign.

As I read through this extraordinarily well-written book, the question that kept cropping up was: Why is Nestel doing this? Why has she chosen to betray her peers and expose their shortcomings in a way that could harm the entire midwifery community? Would she not have done better to have let well enough alone, focus her considerable energies on any one of a dozen Canadian institutions that have proved impermeable to change? What principle justified this radical about-face?
The quick answer is that Nestel found the OAM guilty of systemic racism. She first began to suspect that something was deeply wrong in 1989, while attending the annual general meeting of midwifery's professional body. "I was terribly upset by the pervasiveness of 'colour blindness' at the meeting" she writes. In the way she employs the term, "colour blindness" refers not so much to impartiality as to treating people of all colours and races as though they were white, holding white persons' values and having white people's concerns.

In 1995, Nestel headed the Interdisciplinary Childbirth Educators Training Program, which had, that summer, received nearly triple the usual number of applications. Even more unusual was that half of the students were immigrant women. Most were trained midwives from outside Canada, who were seeking to be integrated into Ontario's newly legalized midwifery profession. Week after week, Nestel listened to these women and was taken by the depth of their knowledge and their commitment to humanized maternity practices.

"Their integration into the midwifery profession would be relatively smooth, I predicted. But as time passed on I realized that I was wrong. I was dismayed to see how, with only one exception, all these women retreated from their dream to practice midwifery in Ontario."

Disappointed, Nestel launched investigations that turned up disconcerting facts: Of the 72 midwives who were registered in Ontario in 1996, only one was a woman of colour. Later that year, a BA program was established in the province that raised the count to 96 registered midwives. Of those, only three were new immigrants. Two years later, there were 126 registered midwives in Ontario but only 12 women of colour. The first Canadian legislation establishing midwifery as a state-regulated and state-funded health profession was passed into law in December, 1993. About half of the hundreds of midwives who registered to have their prior training recognized were "racialized minorities." But of the group whose training was finally grandfathered, only 12 per cent were non-whites.

In an attempt to understand what these numbers meant, Nestel conducted a series of interviews, 48 of them included in this book. Many were difficult and uncomfortable. Immigrant women worried about airing their complaints. But slowly, Nestel began detecting a pattern of bullying strategies: calls not returned, impossibly difficult-to-attain transcripts submitted to the OAM and then lost. Nestel heard about a whole variety of white-only support systems, and talked to black women about their often-desperate attempts to conform to a standard that forced them to blanch their names on application forms or dress like the "Avon lady" for interviews.

But even as evidence of systemic racism mounted, Nestel remained unsure that she wanted to prosecute the case. "I struggled greatly with my own betrayal of the midwifery project," she writes. "I needed constant reassurance that my claims were not exaggerated, and that what I was describing was indeed racism and not some other phenomenon."

It even occurs to her that OAM's discrimination was just a temporary measure, a way of avoiding a confrontation with the medical establishment's common misconceptions about Third World midwifery practices. Then she learned that the OAM's power elite has no intention of correcting the problem. On the contrary. Rather than deal with the issues, the OAM set up "equity committees" whose chief task was to deflect criticism and prevent complaints from inflating beyond control.

Nestel tried to get OAM's top executives to tell their side of the story. She was stonewalled. Key players refused repeated requests for interviews. When she finally received an interview with one top executive, it turned out to be a waste of time. None of her questions were addressed. "The OAM executive couldn't even get her mind around the reason why I was asking these kinds of questions. 'Why don't you do some quantitative research,' she advised me in a manner that could only be interpreted as patronizing."

Early doubts were replaced by frustrations. Finally, Nestel concluded that the OAM's power elite was simply in denial. At the uppermost rungs, executives hid within an impenetrable internal discourse that functioned like body armour. Nestel recalled that just this sort of insularity had characterized the early history of the feminist movement. At its inception, the movement formed a single united front. Its leaders treated all women as essentially the same: They were sisters bound together against a common oppressor, the male.

There was tremendous power in this kind of collectivity. But there was also tremendous self-deception. In the 1970s, a group of black women went public in a document that came to be known as the Combahee River Collective Statement. In this manifesto, black women declared that they felt very little kinship with white middle-class women who formed the bulk of the feminist movement. "Although we are feminists and lesbians," the Combahee signatories wrote, "we feel solidarity with progressive black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand." Worldwide feminism rocked and splintered as a result of the Combahee statement.

But the OAM executives acted as though Combahee had never happened. Cloaking themselves in the mantel of universalism, they were reliving the early history of feminism as though the women's movement had learned nothing from its past.

In Nestel's view, this indifference amounted to more than just a violation of standards of fairness and equality: It was a violation of a paramount principle, that equality can never simply be assumed (as the American federalists believed), but can only be accomplished by the very hard work it takes to recognize the real differences between one human being and another. When she finally grasped that the OAM was violating this deepest principle, Nestel was convinced that there was no choice but to go forward with her indictments.

"Women who belong to dominant classes must take responsibility for, and ultimately alter, practices that recreate hierarchies, even when these hierarchies seem to be necessary for feminist emancipatory projects," Nestel writes. "It is essential that racially dominant people hear the stories of segregated people which, when [dominant people] are implicated in them, become inaudible."

But the women to whom Nestel addresses herself have long ago grown deaf.

David Berlin's two daughters both prefer home birth, a preference that scares him almost more than the idea of becoming a grandfather scares him.

---

Sweet Home Birth Boxes - the supplies you need no matter what your birth plan includes!

Choose Your Words Carefully - The hidden meanings that do more harm than good.

This morning after spending an hour in bed with my son reading, playing, cuddling and nursing, I sat down at the computer to work. I was in the process of closing down MSN Today, an online magazine that automatically opens with MSN Messenger service, when this caught my eye:I was dismayed! Besides the obviously offensive, backward and narrow-minded elements in the headline, I was also struck by that which others might overlook. Breastfeeding was spelled as two words, not one, not even hyphenated.

In terms of grammar, words composed of two individual words joined together (like sandpaper and flowerpot) are called compound words. Often new formations will be spelled as two separate words or hyphenated until they gain sufficient acceptance within the culture or native speaking population to no longer be considered either slang or a new coinage. Consider email for instance. Email began as electronic mail, became e-mail and finally email, indicating its widespread use and acceptance.

Spelling breastfeeding as two words does two things:

• draws the eye to the word breast, as if highlighting subconsciously that the real issue is the breast rather than how we choose to feed our children


• makes a subtle point that breastfeeding is still not culturally acceptable to consider it as a single word (or at the very least, a hyphenated compound).

I can only assume that MSN Today, with their staff of editors consciously chose the spelling in their headline, knowing full well the connotations of such a choice and I must point out that dictionaries spell breastfeeding as a single compound or as a hyphenated compound.

The title of the story as posted on MSNBC (where you are directed when you click on the MSN link) is Food or Lewd? Breast-feeding reveals divide. Why we get so worked up about how women feed their babies.The story uses breast-feeding (with the hyphen) consistently and encourages widespread acceptance of breastfeeding, citing that it is the healthiest choice for babies and drawing attention to the ridiculousness of calling breastfeeding lewd (see the section on Las Vegas, for instance).

The piece is attempting to explore just that: why we get so worked up about how women feed their babies. Good question. However, food or lewd? - this question isn't even worth asking. Women have breastfed their babies for thousands of years. Formula as an option for feeding babies has only been around since the mid-1800's. Clearly, the answer is food.

As to the relative lewdness of breastfeeding, here is a photo of Selma Hayek at this year's Golden Globes. She looks fabulous. Her dress is pretty low cut. In fact, she's showing more of her breasts than the two women breastfeeding in the article's photo and more than most of the women I know who breastfeed.

Breastfeeding mothers tend to make an effort to be discrete and modest, especially when nursing in public. Notice how this mom is turned toward her baby, her shoulder turned in, her shirt pulled down and her hand covering skin as she helps baby latch. The posture is partly functional but also an attempt at some privacy. She's not just sitting down and whipping out her breast. There is nothing lewd about either of the women in this photo.

Granted babies are sometimes hard to latch, they wriggle and want to see what's happening. We sometimes have wardrobe malfunctions and occasionally, a nipple may make it's appearance. Usually extremely briefly. If this makes you uncomfortable, avert your eyes. It's a small occupational hazard. It doesn't make the act of feeding one's child lewd.

Essentially those who find breastfeeding objectionable do so presumably because they think it is gross or too sexual. Is this the Victorian era? Are we supposed to be ashamed that we have breasts at all? Breastfeeding is not a private act between mother and child because it is not an intimate sexual moment. It is a building block of human growth, development, attachment...and life. Furthermore, breastfeeding is not simply about feeding. It is about giving your child the best possible food. It is one of the most important decisions you can make regarding your child's health.

There is NO question about whether breastfeeding is food or lewd. Even putting that question in the title of an otherwise supportive article does a great disservice to mothers and babies everywhere because it implies that the question is up for debate. It is not. Health officials are united in saying that breastfeeding is the best choice for infants. They are unanimous about the health benefits. The only people who are still struggling with the concept are the 30% (as cited in the article) who need to get over their hangups.

Just as it is unethical to debate whether or not smoking or anorexia are bad for your health, it is unethical to call into question whether or not breastfeeding is acceptable. A piece about society's attitudes on the subject is a welcome way to get people thinking but it's time to leave out the sensationalism and get on with the educating.

Read the article.

---

Sweet Home Birth Boxes - the supplies you need no matter what your birth plan includes!

Babies' health not in formula

By Pieta Woolley
September 21, 2006

The Nestlé booth was abuzz with pregnant women and new parents at the Baby and Family Fair on September 16 and 17. The attraction was free Baby Einstein and Disney DVDs, free rice-cereal samples, free infant formula samples, and a send-away card for a free diaper bag, a baby-magazine subscription, and more formula. It was one of the juiciest giveaways at the Vancouver Convention and Exhibition Centre event.

Meanwhile, Douglas College's perinatal program manager, Kathleen Lindstrom, was trying to entice the thousands of orb-bellied women to come to her breast-feeding workshop.

“I said, 'Come find out how to save thousands of dollars a year and feed your baby free,'” Lindstrom recounted to the Georgia Straight. “But I couldn't tear them away from the formula booths. I felt like getting on the loudspeaker and saying, 'Do you not care about what's going into your baby?'”

Lindstrom said she was disgusted that at a trade show designed to “nurture the parent-child bond” she was forced to compete with formula companies. “There isn't close to the same amount of money to market breast-feeding as there is to market formula,” she said. “If there were, we wouldn't have a problem.”

That scene would be illegal had Canada implemented the World Health Organization's 1981 Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes. The code, which prohibits the direct marketing of baby formula to families, marks its 25th anniversary this year. Breast milk beats formula, according to the WHO, because it promotes cognitive development and protects infants against infectious and chronic diseases, reducing infant mortality. In developing countries, this is especially important, as formula is relatively expensive and water is not necessarily safe.

Handing out formula samples is prohibited in Brazil, India, Bolivia, and Botswana, among other countries, according to Elisabeth Turkin, executive director of the pro-breast-feeding lobby group InFact Canada””and, she said, it should illegal be here, too. “We let companies bombard women from pregnancy with samples, book clubs, ads in parenting magazines,” Turkin told the Straight in a phone interview from Toronto. “Even doctors offer free samples. It's a huge interference on the part of the industry in competing with breast-feeding practices.”

Breast-feeding, which is promoted by Health Canada as the best nourishment for most infants, is still far from universal in this country. About 85 percent of today's mothers try to breast-feed, according to Statistics Canada's 2005 Health Reports. (However, one third of moms can't breast-feed for health reasons.)
But the report found that just 17 percent of women fed their babies exclusively with breast milk to six months, which the WHO recommends. Plus, just nine percent are still breast-feeding even occasionally at one year. Of the women who didn't breast-feed, the number-one response was that bottle feeding was “easier”, followed by statements that breast-feeding was “disgusting” or “unappealing”. Also, the less a family earns, the less likely a mother is to breast-feed.

Along with Nestlé, Abbott Laboratories' Similac and Mead Johnson Nutritionals' Enfamil were at the recent baby fair. Playtex was also there, marketing bottles. None of the companies returned the Straight's calls or e-mails by deadline.
The show's producer, Tracey Anderson of Shake Productions, is familiar with both the popularity of the formula booths and the uproar they cause.

“We get hate mail,” Anderson told the Straight. “People come into our office at the show and tell us they're disgusted with us and that we're antibaby.”

Before each of the four annual shows, Anderson discussed with her two business partners whether to include the formula companies. So far, they've always been included. The organizers provide balance by also including the La Leche League, doulas, Douglas College's perinatal program, and breast-feeding seminars, she said. And the show's mission statement is to provide information, not act as a gatekeeper, Anderson pointed out.

“We try to remain neutral on everything,” she said.

The WHO isn't the only UN agency trying to prevent formula-marketing. UNICEF's Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative prohibits medical units from handing out free and low-cost samples of baby formula. Canada lags behind most industrialized countries, according to UNICEF, with just eight baby-friendly centres; seven are in Quebec, one in Ontario. The United States has 25; Turkey, 83; Mexico, 692; India, 1,250; and China, 6,312.

InFact spearheads the Canadian Nestlé boycott, which raises awareness about formula-marketing here and in developing countries. In the 1980s, the Nestlé boycott was InFact's only project; now, Turkin explained, it shares the nonprofit's time with National Breastfeeding Week, an annual conference, newsletters, and information campaigns.

“We work so closely with health care and the mothers' sector,” Turkin said. “The information doesn't go to younger people as it should.”

Lindstrom noted that good information about formula is essential, because, she said, moms who formula-feed in a baby's first few weeks generally are not still breast-feeding at six months.

---

Article courtesy of the Georgia Straight.
For more info on InFact's Nestle boycott, check out this .pdf.

---

Sweet Home Birth Boxes - the supplies you need no matter what your birth plan includes!

Afghanistan: Life Saver

Young Woman Battles Nation’s Biggest Killer

Tales of suicide bombers and battles with Taliban insurgents continue to dominate the news from Afghanistan, but there remains a far more pervasive threat to human life in the troubled nation.

Afghanistan has the second-worst infant mortality rate in the world. One in six newborns die before their first birthday, and 6 out of every 100 mothers die during childbirth. Cultural constraints mean it is rare for male doctors to assist women giving birth and there are few midwives, especially in rural areas.

But one young woman helping reverse the trend is Zahara Zamani.

While a refugee in Iran, Zahara, 22, says she dreamed of becoming a health professional.

“Sometimes I would see people with health problems, especially women,” she recalls. “I wanted to help.”

A Life-Changing Tragedy

Later, following her return to Afghanistan, she remembers one case that especially touched her — a pregnant neighbor suffering from anemia who went into labor. Her child died almost immediately. Meanwhile the mother experienced massive hemorrhaging and died the next day.

“She was at home with her family. They didn’t understand what was happening. They weren’t educated about anemia. They didn’t take her to the hospital,” Zahara says sadly.

The experience spurred her to complete a World Vision-supported midwife training program based in Herat, western Afghanistan.

Following graduation in 2005, she returned to Jibril, in the Herat Province, where she took a job with a health clinic that serves 40,000 people in the village and neighboring communities.


As a midwife in the town of Jibril, Zahara sees some 50 women
each day. Photo by Mary Kate MacIsaac.


It’s a busy job. Over 120 patients visit the clinic daily; about 50 of them are women seeking Zahara’s advice and expertise. Many travel several miles by foot or donkey to reach help.

Among those who are delighted Zahara has brought her newfound skills to Jibril is Dr. Abdul Wali Alami, director of the clinic.

He recalls the situation before Zahara began working there — women suffering childbirth complications seldom had the support they needed.

“They would cut the umbilical cord with a dirty knife. The women didn’t know about pre-natal or post-natal care. They had no information about it,” he says.

Today, Zahara spends much of her time counseling about pregnancy care, believing that education is the key to reversing Afghanistan’s dire maternal and infant mortality rates.

Since 2004, 82 midwives have graduated from the midwife training program and are at work throughout western Afghanistan. Another 60 students are now in training. It’s expected the midwives’ efforts to educate and assist women through their pregnancies will ultimately slash death rates.

Zahara has become a significant agent of change in the Afghanistan of tomorrow.

---

Article courtesy of World Vision International. Please visit to learn more.
You can also read about how a neonatal clinic is reducing infant mortality rates in Afghanistan.

---

Sweet Home Birth Boxes - the supplies you need no matter what your birth plan includes!

Power to the Working Moms!

I would like to appologize for not posting lately. I returned to work 3 days a week at the end of November and I'm still finding it to be quite an adjustment. I'm enjoying the work and enjoying being out of the house a bit but life has sped up to the point where it feels like we are all running on a treadmill set a tad too fast for us.

I am thankful that I'm only working three days a week. I am thankful that my sister is watching my son so I didn't have to find daycare. I am thankful that I can take the skytrain downtown so my commute is under forty-five minutes.

However, I miss my son. I miss being home to work on the projects I started while on maternity leave. I struggle to get dinner served on time. I struggle to get out of bed in the morning (my son has slipped back into the habit of night nursing four times a night since I went back to work).

I am in awe of those moms who work full-time, dropping kids at daycare, commuting. I don't know how you do it. I hear the big answer is a crock-pot.

I wanted to post some resources for working moms:

• ivillage


• family education

I would love it if you could share some other tips and resources. Please post a comment and let us know what works for you.

---

Sweet Home Birth Boxes - the supplies you need no matter what your birth plan includes!