Birth Matters: A Midwife's Manifesta

A very readable, engaging, and concise primer on why birth matters and what's going wrong with it in the contemporary US.

Gaskin speaks here to a broad audience--parents and people with no interest in having children, women and men, people with significantly different political perspectives and approaches to birth / parenting / reproductive rights. Birthing Matters articulates what so many of us in the birth advocacy world want people to hear: why our culture's views and treatment of pregnant/birthing/breastfeeding women should matter a great deal to you whether you personally are a woman or pregnant/birthing/breastfeeding (especially if you're a feminist and/or claim to care about human beings). Here, Gaskin sets aside the more overtly show more gender-essentializing language and emphases of some of her other work (which seems to be aimed at a narrower readership), presumably to focus on areas of broad interest: for instance, her call to reduce pregnancy/birth-related deaths in part by creating a meaningful system of reporting and reflecting on the maternal deaths that do happen. It really would be hard for anyone to say, 'No, I like it when women die needlessly in childbirth, and I don't think we should bother keeping track,' right?

The chapter about and addressed to fathers-to-be is actually quite good: I was nervous because I know how awful most just-for-dads writing is! But why "fathers"? Everything she says here is equally useful and relevant for women who are birthing women's partners. The book, troublingly, seems to assume that everyone's straight and everyone's cis-gendered. These oversights seem especially out of place given the book's otherwise inclusive, respectful, and loving tone. show less

Ina May Gaskin asserts that the way in which women become mothers is a women's rights issue, and it is perhaps the act that most powerfully exhibits what it is to be instinctually human. Birth Matters is a spirited manifesta showing us how to trust women, value birth, and reconcile modern life with a process as old as our species.