Open Season A Survival Guide for Natural Childbirth and Vbac in the 90s

For childbirth activist and birth counselor Nancy Wainer Cohen, this book is the "sibling" to Silent Knife: Cesarean Prevention & Vaginal Birth After Cesarean (Bergin & Garvey 1983) her critically-acclaimed expose on America's growing reliance on cesarean sections. Open Season provides fresh insights and new information on the subject, offering guidance to childbearing couples, educators, health professionals and scholars who value the natural path of childbirth. Readers will find this book timely, informative, funny irreverent, and extremely readable. Cohen's intimate writing style presents a compendium of knowledge on childbirth in the fashion of a "personal letter". Her aim: to lower America's shockingly high cesarean section rate, to increase the number of VBACs, and most importantly, to re-awaken women to the positive nature of pregnancy and childbirth. To help the reader gain a full understanding of the disparity between what childbirth has been turned into vs. what it truly is, Cohen not only discusses the most obvious violation--cesarean section--but also shares her knowledge about other unnecessary interventions, such as fetal monitoring, intravenous feeding, and drug administration. Happily, the reality of hospital birth is contrasted to the beauty of natural childbirth. Despite its critical look at the medical establishment, Open Season is a hopeful book. It is valuable to the general reader because it is informative and enlightening, and indispensable to women because it instills confidence in their ability to birth naturally, and reminds them that birth is a positive, empowering experience.Cohen, Nancy W. is the author of 'Open Season A Survival Guide for Natural Childbirth and Vbac in the 90s' with ISBN 9780897892728 and ISBN 0897892720.