Monthly Archives: May 2005

Colicky babies

By The Midwife | Published: May 27, 2005

A friend with a colicky baby has suddenly begun to swear by this method of colic massage. First decent sleep she’s gotten in weeks, apparently! Who knows, maybe it will work wonders on your own colicky baby too. Check it out.

Posted in Babies!, Postpartum | Leave a comment

Summer Reading

By The Midwife | Published: May 24, 2005

So, my birthday is just around the corner, and I spent part of today updating my wishlist on Amazon, just in case anyone wanted to check it out (you never know, after all). While there, I noticed that just about every book on my list was a pregnancy or childbirth book. Funny, that. I love […]

Posted in Education, Midwifery, Research | Leave a comment

Favorite new birth quote!

By The Midwife | Published: May 13, 2005

“We have a secret in our culture, it’s not that birth is painful, it’s that women are strong.” —Laura Stavoe Harm

Posted in Labor and Birth, Midwifery | Leave a comment

Emergency car-birth kit

By The Midwife | Published: May 12, 2005

I have a friend who’s pregnant with her second child right now. Her first labor went very quickly and easily for her—she got to 4 cm dilated without even being aware that she was contracting in the first place. With second babies, labor tends to go even more quickly and easily, so my friend and […]

Posted in Homebirth, Questions | 2 Comments

Surely we can do better than this

By The Midwife | Published: May 10, 2005

It’s summertime! The weather is warm, the t-shirts and skirts have been dragged out of the depths of my closet, and school is officially on hold for the next three months, which means I have a lot more time to play around on the internet, and go for walks, and eat ice cream, and most […]

Posted in Cesarean Birth, Hospitals, Labor and Birth | Leave a comment

Gods and Goddesses of Birth

By The Midwife | Published: May 6, 2005

I’ve been writing a lot of activist, news-focused, political posts lately, so I thought I should borrow a page from Monty Python: and now for something completely different! Birth is an awe-inspiring thing. It’s one of the few moments in a person’s life when the constructs of our reality crack wide open and we come […]

Posted in Myth, Folklore and Ritual | Leave a comment

No advantages to episiotomies

By The Midwife | Published: May 5, 2005

Here’s a newsflash: In a sytematic review of the literature in this month’s JAMA, researchers have recently found that routine episiotomy offers no benefit to women, and may in fact do more harm than good. Reuters picked up the article here. I have never understood routine episiotomy, and in my work as a nurse, every […]

Posted in Episiotomies, Labor and Birth, Research | Leave a comment

An update on the pharmacy front

By The Midwife | Published: May 4, 2005

I wrote last week about the alarming trend of pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions that they didn’t agree with. Thanks to the good folks at NARAL, you can now write to some of the nation’s biggest pharmacy chains and let them know exactly what you think about this.

Posted in Choice, Contraception, Politics, Primary Care | Leave a comment

Nurse-ins at Starbucks

By The Midwife | Published: May 3, 2005

In my never-ending quest to provide this journal with the coolest links in the world, I most recently stumbled upon Hip Mama, an informative online parenting zine with a decidedly wicked feminist/activist streak. In other words, just my kind of zine. While purusing the site and getting the lay of the land, I read a […]

Posted in Breastfeeding, Politics | Leave a comment