Husband-Coached Childbirth by Robert A. Bradley (2008, Paperback)

I didn't want to read this. Seemed like a bad idea, injecting myself into the delivery room when the place was full of medical experts with years on experience. My wife Mary Ann was not happy with how her first two deliveries had gone and, as a nurse, she had a gut feeling that something was seriously out of kilter with the way Americans do childbirth. So I found the book and read it to make her feel better, but we'd done LeMaze classes and I couldn't see the point of any of this.

What followed for us was a journey I can honestly describe as enlightenment. This was about as much like LeMaze as 2+2 is like integral calculus. I will not indict the medical establishment as many in the "natural childbirth" community do. I will urge you to be informed and to take initiative about how the first, profoundly important months of your child's life will go. You have many more choices than you realize.

You can hand control of the whole affair over to your doctor and the hospital, as we once did. You'll survive. You can have a baby in your bedroom with a midwife. You might survive, you might not. You can also take informed and intelligent responsibility for the life you have created. You can work with your doctor and write a birthing plan based on the choices that are important to you. We actually fired an obstetrician during labor because he wouldn't listen to us (he was filling in for our own doctor who had the nerve to leave town the day before). I mean fired. Gone. He was spewing invective as he stormed out the door. I negotiated with a another doctor right there in the hall; we hired him and got back on track.

You can do that when you are confident, informed, and prepared. It's a lot more work than taking a LeMaze course. LeMaze is fine for keeping Dad's out of the way and busy doing nothing important. You want to know what's REALLY going on? Read this.

George McGuan