Hey! Who’s Having This Baby Anyway? : Take charge; Create safe environment

By Breck Hawk (Including essential information about medications and interventions a guide and workbook.), Metropolis Ink/End Table Books, July 15, 2005.

Finally, a guidebook giving pregnant women the information they need for a safe and healthy birth showing laboring woman how to avoid unnecessary medical interventions and providing current facts so they can make intelligent decisions before and during their labor. With chapters from Medications in Labor and Hiring the Help to Successful Breastfeeding, this book empowers and educates the mom-to-be.

Holistic Pregnancy and Childbirth: Natural Ways to Have a Healthy, Joyful Experience

by James Marti, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., March 8, 1999.

Your month-by-month guide to the latest therapies, techniques, and natural approaches.

For the most rewarding path to a comfortable pregnancy, a shorter labor, and the joyful delivery of a healthy baby, turn to this wise and warm compendium of proven holistic advice.

Approved by an advisory board of leaders in obstetrics and holistic medicine, this comprehensive book helps you make the birthing experience the most fulfilling and beautiful of your life. Let the journey begin. Monitor your physical changes and your baby s. Decide where you want to have your baby. Choose a holistic caregiver and prepare a birth plan. Design your optimum diet and personal exercise program. Discover today s holistic techniques for bonding, postpartum recovery, breast-feeding, and much more, including:
* Acupuncture and acupressure aromatherapy Ayurvedic medicine
* Bach flower remedies breathing techniques botanical medicine
* Chiropractic diet and nutrition exercise homeopathy
* Hydrotherapy hypnosis intimacy exercises massage
* Meditation osteopathy qigong traditional Chinese medicine
* Vitamin and mineral therapies yoga

Impact of Birthing, Practices on Breastfeeding: Protecting the Mother and Baby Continuum

By Mary Kroeger, Linda J. Smith

Impact of Birthing Practices on Breastfeeding: Protecting the Mother and Baby Continuum is Mary Kroeger’s examination of the spectacular bond between the human mother and her newborn from the perspective of labor, birth, and breastfeeding. With 25 years of experience as a nurse, midwife, and international maternal and child health consultant, Kroeger addresses the failure of both western and developing country breastfeeding promoters and supporters to link the impact of certain childbirth interventions on the readiness of mother or newborn to breastfeed.

Ina May's Guide to Childbirth: Discover the Proven Wisdom That Has Guided Thousands of Women Through Childbirth With More Confidence, Less Pain and Little or No Medical Intervention

What you need to know to have the best birth experience for you. Drawing upon her thirty-plus years of experience, Ina May Gaskin, the nation’s leading midwife, shares the benefits and joys of natural childbirth by showing women how to trust in the ancient wisdom of their bodies for a healthy and fulfilling birthing experience. Based on the female-centered Midwifery Model of Care, Ina May’s Guide to Natural Childbirth gives expectant mothers comprehensive information on everything from the all-important mind-body connection to how to give birth without technological intervention. Filled with inspiring birth stories and practical advice, this invaluable resource includes:€ Reducing the pain of labor without drugs--and the miraculous roles touch and massage play. This book takes the fear out of childbirth by restoring women’s faith in their own natural power to give birth with more ease, less pain, and less medical intervention.

Labors of Love: A Doula's Birth Stories

This book brings you inside the intense and intimate world of real-life births. Story after spell-binding story provides a rare, doula’s-eye view of how the birthing process often unfolds in today’s hospitals. A wide variety of deliveries are experienced, including intervention-free, medicated and cesarean. Whether you’re pregnant, planning on becoming pregnant, or are a childbirth professional, you’ll appreciate this collection of uniquely moving birth stories – each one sharing the challenges and joys that laboring women experience as they bravely bring their babies into this world.

Medications and Mothers Milk: A Manual of Lactational Pharmacology (Medications and Mother's Milk)

By Thomas W. Hale, Ph.D.

I have the '96 edition of this book and am eagerly awaiting the '97 edition. It's small enough that I can carry it in my purse or diaper bag. While some of the information that Hale provides may be too technical for non-medical professionals I have used this book over and over since I got it. I feel so much better having this book with me when I see a doctor since I can look up medications right then and not have to worry about whether they are compatible with nursing or not. I recommend this book to all nursing mothers and anyone in the medical profession who ever has contact with a nursing mother.

Mind over Labor: A Breakthrough Guide to Giving Birth

By Carl Jones, Marian Thompson

"This book will show you how to create the kind of birth you want," writes Jones, author of After the Baby Is Born, etc. He compares childbirth to lovemaking in terms of the potential joy for the woman and claims that the key to a "safe, happy birth" is mental imagerythe art of creating vivid pictures in the mind to help the woman "surrender" to the "pleasure" of childbirth. Mental-imagery exercises include thinking of a "Special Place," such as a favorite beach, or envisioning the child in the womb and asking "what he or she needs." Jones stresses the importance of a mellow labor environment and subtly promotes the idea of delivery at home or in a childbearing center, but he fails to spell out the risks of a nonhospital delivery. His goal of a well-informed, positive-thinking pregnant couple is admirable, but his insistence that attitude can overcome virtually any problem is questionable.

Mindful Birthing: Training the Mind, Body, and Heart for Childbirth and Beyond

by Nancy Bardacke, HarperOne Publishers, July 10, 2012.

With Mindful Birthing, Nancy Bardacke, nurse-midwife and mindfulness teacher, lays out her innovative program for pregnancy, childbirth, and beyond. Drawing on groundbreaking research in neuroscience, mindfulness meditation, and mind/body medicine, Bardacke offers practices that will help you find calm and ease during this life-changing time, providing lifelong skills for healthy living and wise parenting.

SOME OF THE BENEFITS OF MINDFUL BIRTHING:

Increases confidence and decreases fear of childbirth
Taps into deep inner resources for working with pain
Improves couple communication, connection, and cooperation
Provides stress-reducing skills for greater joy and wellbeing

MORE THAN A MIDWIFE: Stories of Grace, Glory, and Motherhood.

In More Than A Midwife, veteran midwife Mary Sommers shares stories of glory, grace and joy, as well as heartbreak and tragedy, experienced through her 20-plus years of working with mothers and their infants. Mary has attended and assisted at more than 1,000 births in the United States, Mexico, Africa, and Europe.

Mother Massage: A Handbook for Relieving the Discomforts of Pregnancy

By Elaine Stillerman, LMT, (New York, NY: A Delta Book pub. by Dell Publishing, 1992.)

This is a perfect book for expectant mothers and their massage therapists. It gives great insite to pregnancy for first time mothers and therapists who are trying to gain more knowledge on the subject. It gives one overviews throughout the book about other cultures and their traditions. This is definately one to have in your library.