Eight Books I Read About Birth & Babies in 2020

Even before I became a doula, I loved to read about birth. Now I love it even more, because each book read helps give me a deeper understanding of all the ways women and their families can benefit from support. Pregnancy, birth, and babies are such vast, intricate topics and I love learning more about them and sharing these things with clients. Here are the eight books I read in 2020 (this doesn’t count, of course, all the research articles I read online! Maybe I should track that one day too…)

1) Birth With Confidence: Savvy Choices for Normal Birth by Rhea Dempsey ~ I wrote an in-depth review of this one here. For women who want a non-medicated birth (certainly not every woman), Dempsey gives so much strength & encouragement. I really loved her discussions of functional pain, connecting birth pains to the pain athletes endure in their training. Fabulous to read as a doula and could be very helpful for birth prep too. I read this one on Hoopla Digital, through our library system.

2) The Vital Touch: How Intimate Contact With Your Baby Leads to Happier, Healthier Development by Dr. Sharon Heller ~ For a book over 20 years old, it is amazing ow much of it still holds true in the research world today when it comes to healthy infant practices. American culture needs this message just as much in 2020 as they did in 1997 - we are made to be connected beings, babies benefit from being held and touched (they cry less, they gain weight faster, they are not as stressed, etc). This book is fairly dense, so I think I will be keeping an eye out for a TedTalk version of its messages or continue distilling the research to my Instagram feed…

3) Invisible Women: Data Bias In A World Designed For Men by Caroline Criado Perez - This book is (not surprisingly) about the gender gaps in our data, why they matter, & how so few people interested in them. I did not agree with all of Perez’s statements or conclusions, but she makes several crucial points that everyone needs to recognize - one of them being that medical research is often horribly negligent when it comes to finding out how women’s bodies work & respond to medications and treatments. It is incredibly hard to get funding research for things related to women’s health (I wrote about one study involving baking soda here) . And assumptions are often made about a woman’s body based only on our knowledge of male bodies. Or they are ignorant about women’s reproductive health (it takes far, faaaar too long to diagnose a woman with endometriosis, for instance). Basically, y’all, we need to work more on women’s health!

4) Safe Infant Sleep: Expert Answers to Your Co-Sleeping Questions by James McKenna ~ One of the best books from 2020! I wrote a full review of it in this post and I asked my local library to purchase a copy of it (which they did! thank you, Tippecanoe County Public Library!). This was much better than his first title, in my opinion - a more thorough discussion of the research that supports bed-sharing when done safely, and a look at how fundamentally flawed our current, Western modern culture is when tackling this issue.

5) Babies Are Not Pizzas: They’re Born, Not Delivered by Rebecca Dekker from Evidence Based Birth ~ I love the EBB website & was really excited to read this one. It was good for a crash course on birth, although a great deal of the material was information I was familiar with already (I guess I’m not a layman anymore though?). The birth information was mixed up with her personal story - academia & entrepreneurship. This book was good, but I will probably not re-read it - I will, however, continue to make dozens of visits to the EBB website every year. ;)

6) Your Birth Plan by Megan Davidson, PhD - Fairly straightforward & clearly written, although doesn’t have as much clear research as I’d like to see for researching risks & benefits. If you have a doula (and you do, right?) - she might be a better resource because of how much we can tailor information for your particular needs. But this is also an easy-to-access resource about many birth subjects. One of my favorite parts of this book I wrote about here - the 3 C’s of birth.

7) 7 Secrets of the Newborn by Robert C. Hamilton ~ apparently he’s famous for the Hamilton Hold on YouTube…? I didn’t know this. I found the book at the library & picked it up because I just love reading about babies. Ultimately, I wanted to like this one more than I actually did. I agreed with many of his points.. babies are wonderful, they don’t need a lot of stuff, they need to be a part of your daily life, population decline is actually more of a concern than population growth…. but then there were points where he was flat out wrong & a bit outdated (actually, Dr. Hamilton, water birth can be safe….). And even when I agreed with him, the writing style felt a bit forced. So… not a bad resource, really, but not one of the best ones either.

8) Defiant Birth: Women Who Resist Medical Eugenics, compiled by Melinda Tankard Reist ~ A collection of essays by women who have been pressured to abort because of prenatal diagnoses or their own special needs. This book was really special to me as a sister to someone with profound disabilities and as a mother to a child with a rare genetic condition. The mothers in the essays had so much strength, their stories were so beautiful, some heart shattering - some full of joy ~ all full of the solid conviction that the pattern of your DNA is not what makes you worth keeping alive (or what gives you the right to bear children) - your worth stems from being human, full stop. I also read this via Hoopla, but I would like to get my hands on a hard copy.
Some of my favorite passages:
from a woman with dwarfism who has children with the condition - “Yes, we have had problems. Each one of the children has undergone some sort of surgery. It is during these times that I falter and become not so ‘defiant.’ We also live in a society that worships physical perfection & doesn’t seem to tolerate anyone or anything that does not conform to what is normal & acceptable. It seems to be harder and harder to step out of our front door and face the world, as it’s a world that doesn’t tolerate difference.”

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“Caregivers who may view continuing a pregnancy following a lethal prenatal diagnosis as an exercise in futility or denial may wish to reconsider their assumptions. Many families see it as an effort to honor their child & to embrace whatever time they may be able to have together, even if it is only before birth.”

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