Take Responsibility for Your Pregnancy

Take responsibility for your pregnancy and for the health of your baby. In response to a reader that has accused me of perpetuating the myth that “premature birth is somehow the mother’s fault”, I feel I must address all of my readers. This email comes as a response to my last article, You Have the Power to Experience a Full-Term Pregnancy.
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Will Your Baby Come Too Soon?

Are you one of the many pregnant women who worry that her baby will come too soon?

But what would you think if I told you that in the homebirth practice I work in, we hardly ever, ever see a baby born before about 39 weeks?

These 2 questions are related because the midwifery community supports and puts into practice certain beliefs about nutrition that the medical world does not. What I have learned is so simple, and makes absolutely so much sense that I hope you can read this and rest assured that if you follow the “advice”, your body will be able to support your baby until it is “full-term” (and in my world, that is 40 weeks, not 37).
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Breastfeeding Success: One thing every mother needs…

If I had a penny for every time I heard a woman with a new baby say that she didn’t have enough milk to breastfeed, or that the baby was too demanding and she couldn’t keep up, I’d be rich.

Now I’m not saying this is the woman’s fault necessarily. We have come to birth and raise our children in this culture that wants to push them away, on the road to independence before they are past infancy. I can’t solve all of these problems (though I might try) but I do have the most fantastic “product” that you just must have if you want to succeed at breastfeeding.
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Making An Informed Choice: GBS in Pregnancy

Group Beta Streptococcus (GBS) testing in pregnant women is pretty standard nowadays. Like a lot of routine testing, many women don’t even know why they are being tested or what exactly they are being tested for. Most women don’t realize that each and every test is also a choice. You don’t absolutely have to consent to test for GBS.

The group beta strep bacteria lives in the gut of many healthy people. It is not an STD. The bacteria, when “normally” colonized is not a problem, and there are plenty of people walking around with it that have no symptoms and never feel the worse for it.
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