Lavender & Letting Go (Warning: Miscarriage/Baby Loss)

My life has taken a sad and unexpected turn. I was 14 weeks pregnant with my third baby and we found out on Friday afternoon that the baby had died. Very early Saturday morning, he was born at home. Though it was different in some ways than a full-term birth, my experience of miscarriage was [...]

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And Even More Birth Quotes

Continuing my semi-regular addition of birth quotes I’ve used on the Talk Birth Facebook page recently.
“When women understand what’s available to us at birth, then we won’t ever give that over to an ‘expert’ the birth power, the orgasmic power that’s in our bodies” –Christiane Northrup
“Women have the inner power and the inner knowledge of [...]

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Moving During Labor

The second Healthy Birth Blog carnival is up on Lamaze’s Science & Sensibility blog. It is a great collection of links to posts about the importance of Healthy Birth Practice #2: Walk, Move Around, and Change Positions During Labor. For the blog carnival I contributed a post/handout I made last year called How to Use [...]

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The most important event shaping my life as a mother?

Recently, this quote from a Midwifery Today blog post came to my attention: “your birth is the most important event in shaping your life as a mother.” It has generated some pretty heated discussion and negative feelings amongst some writers in the blogosphere. Despite my intense commitment to birthwork, I stumble over the quote a [...]

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Birth Talk

As I have referenced several times before I have a special interest in the language of birth. That is part of the reason my blog/business is so-named—because is it is a blog that “talks birth” (as in, “let’s get together and talk birth!”), but also because the way you talk about birth matters. I have [...]

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Birth as a Rite of Passage & ‘Digging Deeper’

I’ve posted about the idea of birth as a rite of passage before and want to share some additional quotes from The Pink Kit:
Whatever the culture, when a woman surrenders to the process, accepts the intense sensations, works through each contraction, and digs deep within herself to achieve the end goal–giving birth–she is touched by [...]

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Small Stone Birth Activism

In 2008, I wrote an article called Small Stone Birth Activism for Citizens for Midwifery News. I revised the article this year and it was published in the Fall 2009 edition of the International Journal of Childbirth Education (ICEA’s publication). It begins on page 8. I also have an older version uploaded here. This version [...]

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Let labor begin on its own…

One of my blog posts that gets the most hits and is a consistently searched for topic is one that I wrote called “how do I know I’m really in labor?” I revised it recently for participation in a blog carnival at Science and Sensibility about letting labor begin on its own. Let Labor Begin [...]

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More Birth Quotes

Reposting some of the quotes I’ve recently shared via my Facebook page…I’m surprised by how many hits my blog gets for people looking for “birth quotes.” I think as long as I bother typing them into Facebook, I might as well then copy them here for those people searching for birth quotes to find! (Here [...]

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Humanized Birth

I recently wrote a post for the Citizens for Midwifery blog about birth practices in the Ukraine which developed into musings about humanized birth (regardless of country). Rather than repeat myself here, I will just go ahead and link to my post:
Birth Plan Item #1: Leave My Cervix Inside My Body!

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