I was really excited to finally read this book, but unfortunately found it to be a letdown for me.

First of all, the author is so bad about cherry picking her data. She downplays conditions that can be serious and only mentions mild potential negatives, while overinflating others, based on what she believes in. I get that she is no expert and has no medical or pregnancy/birthing training, but she was just soooooo biased. Even when presenting information I agreed with, it would have been nice to have been given a neutral perspective as people make different choices for a myriad of reasons.

It was painfully obvious she has never had many of the pregnancy complications she talks about. She is not very educated on them and it shows. She tells the reader they don't need to worry about Gestational diabetes or pre-eclampsia if they eat a healthy diet and exercise....this advice is completely inaccurate and shames those who have it. Gestational diabetes is an issue with the placenta and a sizable portion of people who get it eat well, exercise daily, and are a low to normal BMI. It does not discriminate. Making mothers feel like they did something wrong if they have these conditions is just shameful and trivializing them by saying you can simply get rid of it through these activities is infuriating. She also mentions a few mild risks from Gestational diabetes, but fails to mention more serious risks, such as stillborns. Maybe it isn't a big deal to her, but I guarantee any mother affected disagrees with her oversight. She does the same when she claims there are no risks of going overdue. She personally had two babies over 43 weeks, and I'm happy everything worked for her, but she does not even acknowledge the life threatening risks that affect some babies, which increase every week after 39 and has had a multitude of well documented studies to back it up, and shames mothers who don't just wait.

Much of the information is outdated, as well as her hospital experiences. Most hospitals now keep baby with you the entire time. However, she hasn't personally delivered in a hospital since 2006, so I suppose it isn't surprising she has no idea.

I could go on with quite a few more points, but I think my point has already clearly been made. While I appreciated her sharing her experiences, I really was hoping for more useful information on things like pain management, which she had barely any. Most of it was really obvious, full of bias and opinions, or not detailed enough to provide any true guidance. So while I appreciate that she wrote the book trying to help, it really just didn't deliver.

TW for Fatphobia/ED, Racism, Sexism

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me the opportunity to review this book!

Basic, mostly good information. There's more to say about the negatives than the positives. It's missing a something-something. It lacked inclusion and was generic enough that there wasn't any new or explosive insight you couldn't find by reading a dozen other freebirthing books. I honestly felt really frustrated and struggled to push through it. Did not find it funny/humorous.

Anita Evensen doesn't proclaim to be a medical professional, though /most/ of the advice given is pretty solid and scientifically based as it can be found pretty much everywhere else in relation to freebirth.

On the other hand, she cherrypicks and takes a tone at times that is biased or unprofessional despite repeatedly urging women to continue to research very thoroughly as she did. The problem is if you're presenting yourself as an authority of basic information and good research, you actually need to have looked at the information when you imply or state things as truths. The most inclusive thing she did was say "partner" or "spouse" instead of "husband" even though that's actually what she means throughout.

Cherrypicking: She cherry-picked information about water birth, and while she disclosed that waterbirth wasn't for her, you could tell in the text alone. She chose neutral or misleading information about waterbirth and appeared to spend the least time actually educating about this and was the least supportive in the waterbirth passages. In summation, a woman saying to her, "I really would love to have a water birth," would garner a response of "Whatever you say," instead of firm support as when other birth choices are discussed. Other parts were cherrypicked as well, but this was the only one that was done with disservice to the intent of the book.

She was at times really ignorant of "other" circumstances that some people might be in. What I mean by "other" is that she wrote the book as if the person having the child will always be partnered and at least middle-class. She mentions "just have the spouse do it" repeatedly, and instructs on certain things as given (having a dryer to dry towels to warm them up, as an example, mentioned frequently) instead of proposing them as an available option and offering alternative ways to accomplish that. Implicitly it is written as if a woman is most definitely going to have everything that the author thinks she needs or has the means to get it even if those items are actually totally unnecessary; (I've been in the birth world for 11 years and never have I ever seen or heard of a someone warming towels in a dryer prior to wrapping mom and baby in it. I understand why this is a nice, helpful suggestion - but that is all it is.) There is an entire chapter dedicated to the spouse or birth helper that is excellent, but the condescension toward the partner/husband in the rest of the book was pretty irritating (let him go without clean underwear, he'll figure it out... so does the author really think all spouses are helpless and dependant on who's pregnant for everything until they put their foot down?)

She mentions at the beginning of the book that she's going to alternate referring to the baby as "he" or "she" throughout. It seems like an unnecessary mention and felt more like she was trying to make a point of saying it doesn't matter how she refers to the baby but actually making it a big deal in the process? Not to mention that babies can be born intersex, and it's not always immediately clear if the baby is a biological male or female (or intersex). 2% of people are intersex, as many as have red hair.

Small issues also crop up around things like breastfeeding - outdated information given such as about hindmilk and foremilk.

The big baddies...

Something else that Anita kept doing was making snide and unreasonable comments about weight. She talks about how pregnancy isn't an excuse for a woman to pig out and gives an example of a woman "eating three pizzas and two tubs of ice cream every evening." She is conjuring images to disgust women and shame them about not just food choices, but pregnancy weight gain. It's clear to anyone that you should eat a balanced diet as much as possible, and that too much weight gain *can* be a bad thing. She does not at all discuss how weight gain for women should be an individual assessment and even skimps the number of recommended pounds for the average woman as 15 to 25, when it's actually 28 to 40 for the average woman (and 15 - 25 for someone who's obese). That is given as a recommended average, but again, should be assessed by a person's individual body type and health status. It almost seems as if Anita didn't actually read about healthy weight gain during pregnancy, which makes it ignorant; or she did and she still allowed fatphobic bias in her writing which is also deplorable. It seems more like fatphobia since later she also mentions, "Although I don't suggest you get hung up over the changes in your body, I'm not advocating you just "let yourself go"." Another: "Pregnant women in industrialized countries often use their pregnancy as a time to overeat and put their feet up."

Racist AF parts - Like many before her (it's a huge problem in the birthing and medical community), she paints black African women specifically as resilient or immune to pain. I understand why this conversation comes up in the birthing world as African women have different birthing practices which can be very informative and interesting. HOWEVER, more often than not this is used to unfairly stigmatize and create caricatures of them. She gives the examples of !Kung, San Bushmen, and Bariba tribes in Africa. "They're expected to face the pain of childbirth with courage." Then, "We don't have to give birth exactly the same way those tribal women do, but reading about them can be inspiring. Their faith in the natural birth process of pregnancy and childbirth is encouraging." Why should it be inspiring and encouraging more than any other unassisted birthing practice? Why give this example when there are so many other birth practices to choose from as an example? For the practice she's mentioned (of women being encouraged to be strong, and/or silent during labor), this happens almost exclusively in African patriarchal societies where there is significant pressure on the woman to look strong on behalf of her husband and not because of some inherent faith or serenity they possess during labor. It isn't something that all women want to strive for and she shames women for choosing pain relief. "!Kung girls are encouraged to watch a woman give birth, to help them face their fears. They're expected to face the pain of childbirth with courage. This presents stark contrast to childbirth in the United States, where medical attendants encourage epidurals. In modern societies, even women who don't plan on receiving pain relief in the form of medications still use special techniques to cope with the pain of labor and childbirth, such as relaxation, breathing techniques, counter pressure, massage, and visualization." So why is the contrast so bad? I'm not entirely sure what point she was trying to make here. The African women are basically told they can't have those things, why is that something to encourage? Although the book is about freebirth and Anita claims to be supporting women, that doesn't sound very supportive. It sounds snarky.

She doesn't mention that they have a low fertility and declining birth rate and there's other practices such as bathing pregnant women in urine, either. This ties closely in with the huge racial disparity in maternal/fetal mortality rates in developed countries, the US having a massive racist issue in the OBGYN field itself. Black women die during childbirth at a rate of 40 per 100,000 compared to 12.4 per 100,000 white people, (combined 17.8 per 100,00 all other races on average). That's almost 4x as many as white folks and more than 2x as much as other races. This is partly because of conflations like this where the racism doesn't really feel like racism. Black women aren't believed by medical staff when they are experiencing problems or need pain relief during or after labor. They also experience much higher rates of c-section and other diagnosable complications when they don't really have them. You can throw a rock in the interwebs and find hundreds of stories AND scientific data including celebrities like Serena Williams who can confirm that this is a real issue and is costing lives. To speak about birth, you have to be intersectional. The opportunity to discuss disparities and how freebirthing could be used to reduce the disparities doesn't even come up although it is an excellent topic that would definitely help women be informed even if briefly mentioned.

Never in my life did I think that I’d find myself reading a book about home birth and labor without medical assistance, but after hearing of the horrible experience my sister had while giving birth to my beautiful niece, I was curious and I couldn’t stop myself.
This book was full of great information, simple and understandable, giving future mothers or mothers planning to have another baby all the advice they deserve to know before choosing how they want to give birth. The author gives great guidance and talks about all the different aspects of pregnancy from the dangers of all the different forms of interventions to learning how to take care of the baby and the partner. This book debunks all the lies and fears around the normalization of western childbirth procedures and compares it with different time periods and why women’s bodies can naturally give birth as long as nobody interferes with the process. It was really interesting from the very beginning and learning that the reason why so many women died during childbirth in the Victorian era was that their corsets would often change the shape of their pelvis was fascinating. Definitely a must-read for all future fathers too, who should be included in the process as much as possible from the very beginning. The book offers cheating sheets that can be copied on a separate paper and consulted at all times. It was also clearly stated multiple times that the author herself isn’t a doctor nor a psychologist, which is really important and offers the reader the consciousness that this book isn't and shouldn’t be the only counseling they have to prepare for their home birth journey, which I thought was really nice. The author gives great advice for all mothers in waiting all while explaining the different procedures that could exclude a traditional hospital-assisted birth.
All the different nuances and the shared family experiences the author writes about were heartwarming, to say the least. They showed how much care and love went into the making of this book and how deeply the author feels about this topic. I will definitely recommend this to my sister to read if she ever plans to have another beautiful baby.