Ina May's extensive experience as a midwife will leave you feeling that birth is a completely natural event that every woman is capable of going through. A COMPLETE CONTRAST to the more mainstream bestsellers, such as Your Pregnancy Week by Week and What to Expect When Your Expecting, which made me feel like a pregnant women's body is going to fail her at any moment!

I'm guessing the vast majority of women who buy this book are doing so because they have already decided to try natural childbirth. However, I think even women who are sure they want pain medication would find the labor and childbirth stories in the book very inspiring. Since most of what we hear about childbirth makes it sound scary and unbearably painful, it was a revelation to me that a lot of women found it not only tolerable and empowering but even pleasurable! Clearly Ina May is pro-natural birth, but she doesn't lecture and she gives credit to modern medicine where credit is due. I think anyone giving birth for the first time will take solace in such a radically different point of view of the experience.

My husband and I opted for a natural birth the second time around partly due to the negative affects epidural and episiotomy had on my and our son's bodies. What a fantastic experience! Thanks in part to Gaskin, we were able to go into labor calmly and even with a little excitement. There is a wonderful way to birth your baby. Read up, practice and become prepared, then trust your body to do it's job.

Anyone, anywhere who is expecting a child can benefit from this excellent book. But Americans, who generally have a warped view of childbirth as a horrifying, drug-induced bloody trauma that requires women to submit as patients, are in for a real surprise as they are introduced to a gentler, more empowering way of birthing.

I sought out this book midway in my pregnancy, dissatisfied with the care I had been receiving from my OB, whose rushed, impersonal methods limited my involvement in what was happening to me. Likewise, family, friends and the media had done much over the years to shape my preconceptions of birth as "something to get through."

The first half of Ina May's Guide to Childbirth consists of positive, first-person stories from women who gave birth at The Farm in Tennessee. These stories alone helped to reshape my belief that birth can not only be an enriching experience, but one in which the woman and her partner are active participants in a natural process. Hospital gowns, internal fetal monitors, epidurals and forceps are replaced by an experienced team of midwives who skillfully, intuitively and naturally help a woman's body do what it was born to do.

In the second half of this book, Ina May draws upon more than 30 years' experience as a midwife to gently educate the reader about a woman's awesome ability to give birth without exessive medical intervention. It is an invitation to trust one's body, to rethink destructive stereotypes and ultimately, to shed the fear and anxiety so often associated with childbirth. It helped to change both my husband's mind and my own regarding our course of prenatal care. Though the book is revolutionary from a societal standpoint, it seemed oddly familiar as I realized its content helped strenghthen what I and many other women intuitively know about our innate capabilities to bear children. Highly recommended.

This book was very informative and inspiring. For someone, like myself, who would like to have a natural childbirth for my second child, I finished this book in three days! It was an easy reader with endless information. It also had some really neat pictures!