Giving Birth

Early this week I also finished reading Giving Birth, by Sheila Kitzinger. I posted quotes from it on my other two blogs, so I'm not going to share any quotes here. The book was an interesting read--after a great opening chapter about "Birth as Experience," that I enjoyed very much and another about the couples relationship, there was a series of birth stories. The stories represented a range of experiences (including triplets) and degrees of intervention (some of the births were very medicalized). Each birth story was fairly short and was preceded with an introduction by the author explaining sort of the main "point" of each story. The book then closed with a chapter about what birth is like for the baby.

One of the things I liked about the opening section of the book is how she looked at childbirth education and whether it is effective in preparing women for birth. I find that as I "evolve" as an educator, I become more and more interested in the process of educating, principles of adult education, how people really learn, etc., so I really enjoy reading about, and thinking about, how to share birth information in a way that really works.