International Cesarean Awareness Network

Education, Support, & Advocacy for Birth Justice & Healing

Best of the Birth Blogs – Week Ending July 4th

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Your weekly one-stop for highlights from the birth blogosphere. Visit weekly for the latest on childbirth, especially related to cesarean prevention, recovery, and VBAC. To nominate a blog post to be featured here, email me at blog@ican-online.org.

It’s been a little slow here on the blog so far this summer. Lots going on with family vacations and graduate school for this blogger! I’ll try to keep up and post more often from here on out. Meanwhile, in case you’ve missed what other wonderful birth bloggers have been posting, here are some highlights from the last week:

Do not miss this awe-inspiring video and narrative from midwife and “Spinning Babies Lady” Gail Tully on her Spinning Babies Blog of a second-time VBAC mama’s frank breech homebirth. Those of us in the Twin Cities of Minnesota are so fortunate to have such wonderful midwives who really trust birth.

In case you’ve been reading unsettling headlines about the World Health Organization dumping it’s cesarean rate guidelines, be sure to read Jill’s fact-checking post at The Unnecessarian. Another example of the media gone haywire on childbirth in America.

Speaking of the media, Kmom offers a great analysis on Well-Rounded Mama of a recent Boston Globe op-ed discussing the high costs of cesareans and suggestions on lowering the cesarean rate.

Lastly, Fearless Birth picked up on news of a recent study that shows high protein diets early in pregnancy can help protect mothers from gestational diabetes, something many good midwives have known (without testing mice) for a long time!

Best of the Birth Blogs – Week Ending June 20th

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Your weekly one-stop for highlights from the birth blogosphere. Visit weekly for the latest on childbirth, especially related to cesarean prevention, recovery, and VBAC. To nominate a blog post to be featured here, email me at blog@ican-online.org.

Note: The “best of” blog will be on hiatus next week due to a family vacation without (gasp!) internet access.

Don’t miss the sixth (and final) Healthy Birth Blog Carnival: MotherBaby Edition posted on Giving Birth With Confidence. This carnival focuses on keeping moms and babies together immediately after birth and features several posts that deal with the issue of skin-to-skin contact after cesarean birth.

Given that today is Father’s Day in the U.S., we loved this post from Cesarean Parent’s Blog on dads and birth, which touches on several important topics, including dads in the OR.

Enjoy Birth Blog linked to this story of a doula’s VBA3C.

Finally, ACOG was the focus of much discussion the blogosphere this week, including a post on Our Bodies Ourselves outlining how two articles in the latest issue of Obstetrics and Gynecology, ACOG’s flagship journal,  provide some hope for change in their VBAC guidelines. On the flip-side, several bloggers pointed out ACOG’s attempts to blog access to midwives in New York, including Jennifer Block and Stand and Deliver.

Best of the Birth Blogs – Week Ending June 6th

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Your weekly one-stop for highlights from the birth blogosphere. Visit weekly for the latest on childbirth, especially related to cesarean prevention, recovery, and VBAC. To nominate a blog post to be featured here, email me at blog@ican-online.org.

Thanks to MJ Bray for submitting a nomination for this week! I love receiving these from blog readers. Stork Stories…Birth & Breastfeeding discusses skin-to-skin contact in the OR and encourages women to speak up, share their stories and “ help give a voice to the real need to make skin to skin in the OR routine practice in all ORs.”

While we’re on the subject of speaking up, the Hypnobabies Blog posted a mom’s story of firing her OB during labor because she threatened a cesarean. Although she was induced at 42 weeks, this mom fought off her doctor’s pushes for increased intervention and gave birth to her baby girl on her own terms.

Speaking of birthing on your own terms, the video below is a great montage that questions assumptions such as “all twins are born by cesarean.”

Best of the Birth Blogs – Memorial Day Edition

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Your weekly one-stop for highlights from the birth blogosphere. Visit weekly for the latest on childbirth, especially related to cesarean prevention, recovery, and VBAC. To nominate a blog post to be featured here, email me at blog@ican-online.org.

Hope everyone is enjoying a wonderful Memorial Day weekend (in the U.S.)!

Two great posts this week highlight the not-so-random aspects of medicalized childbirth in the U.S. The Feminist Breeder shares Why I Won’t Leave My Birth Up to Chance and Birth Sense reflects on Cookie-cutter obstetrics.

In addition, a couple of posts this week discussed conditions that are often fodder for unnecessary cesareans. Stand and Deliver contemplates Confidence, competence and preserving breech birth at home, while Mumatopia outlines the issues related to post-dates pregnancy.

Best of the Birth Blogs – Week Ending May 23rd

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Your weekly one-stop for highlights from the birth blogosphere. Visit weekly for the latest on childbirth, especially related to cesarean prevention, recovery, and VBAC. To nominate a blog post to be featured here, email me at blog@ican-online.org.

Birthing Beautiful Ideas had a wonderful and informative post this week on why even women who have planned cesareans might want to consider hiring a doula.

Nurturing Hearts Birth Services posted some thoughts on big babies and why the shouldn’t be so scary after all, as well as a story and pictures of a first-time mom birthing a 10-pound baby in the water.