Are Ultrasounds Causing Autism in Babies?
Scientists are uncovering disturbing evidence that those sneak peeks at baby could damage a developing brain.Toward the end of my first pregnancy, a doctor ordered an “emergency” ultrasound because she believed I was measuring small. She tur...
Improving Your Gut Sense in Pregnancy
Before becoming a chiropractor, I was a microbiologist and immunologist. The microorganisms that we always talked about were the microorganisms that were always feared—the ones that we needed antibiotics and vaccines for, and were a threat to us a...
The Mind-Body Connection in Fertility & Pregnancy
One of the biggest challenges we face in creating the lives we want is that our basic attitudes and perceptions of the world were shaped in the earliest days, months and years of our lives, long before we had a chance to form our own opinions....
Prenatal Yoga and Childbirth Education: Preparing Your Body and Mind
World-renowned yoga teacher Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa shares her thoughts on prenatal yoga, childbirth education and listening to your intuition in an interview with filmmaker Sarah Kamrath for Kamrath’s childbirth- education series, Happy Healthy Child: A...
Sing the Babies Earthside
On one silent night in Indonesia, midwives greet each newborn with song.It’s 3:33 a.m. at the Bumi Sehat (Healthy Mother Earth Foundation) birth center in the village of Nyuh Kuning, just south of the Monkey Forest, in Bali, Indonesia. There i...
Know Your Practitioner: The Three Models of Birth and Health Care
What is a paradigm and why does it matter? How does each paradigm define the human body, and how does this definition affect the kind of healthcare you give and receive? How can we find ways to treat birth humanistically and holistically in an...
Go Ahead... Use the F Word
F-F-F-F-Father. Why do you suppose we have such a hard time using that word in our parenting culture? Almost three years ago I decided that the next phase of my career would be fatherhood education and support—specifically early fatherhood,...
Informed Consent in Childbirth: Making Rights into Reality
Analyses of problems in U.S. maternity care often focus on medical factors and cost issues, important issues for healthcare policy. But a central factor at play in the use and misuse of medical resources is a foundational concept of healthcare law:...
Parental Power: Rally to Improve Birth Reaches Millions
This past Labor Day—September 2, 2013— thousands of women, their families, and those who care for them assembled all over the country. In more than 160 cities around the United States, and in Puerto Rico, Australia, Japan and Canada, women’s voices...
What is Evidence-Based Maternity Care?
Evidence-based maternity care means practices that have been shown by the highest-quality, most current medical research to be most beneficial to mothers and babies (reducing incidences of injuries, complications and death), with care tailored to...
Healing Birth, Healing the Earth
Birth, she is dying. This primal and unspeakably powerful initiation, the only road to motherhood for our ancestors, has been stripped of her dignity and purpose in our times. Birth has become a dangerous medical disease to be treated with...
Gentle Birth Strategies
There is a misconception in modern childbirth. It is that childbirth should be painless. Women today are being raised to believe that a painless birth is a good birth. The word and concept of “pain” has negative connotations for many. The very...
Epidural Anesthesia: Important Facts that will Help You Take Charge of Your Birth
Each year, 4 million American women give birth.1 Epidural anesthesia is used in almost two-thirds of labors, making it one the most common obstetric interventions in the United States today.2 In...
Beautiful Music: The Benefits of Singing to your Baby, Before and After Birth
People have sung to their babies forever. Every culture has lullabies and children’s songs that are passed down through the generations. New ones are written and shared, and the custom goes on—a rich part of the fabric of human civilization. These...
The Dad Factor
Fathers make a world of difference to a child’s life—but what about at birth?While no one was looking, the very foundations of our society, our culture and our families have undergone a metamorphosis. Fathers are attending the births of the...
Bear Wisdom: Reconnecting with Mama and Papa Bear
Childbearing, from the mysterious and miraculous ability to conceive and to give birth, on through the nourishing acts of child rearing, has suddenly become an explosive minefield of fear, insecurity and guilt. As a collective culture, we have...
Mind the Gap
CPD is the most common reason for performing a caesarean. But how common is it, really?In the 18th and 19th centuries, poor nutrition, rickets, and illnesses such as polio caused pelvic anomalies, which resulted in loss of life during...
Six Signs You Should Dump Your Prenatal Caregiver
No doubt about it: Deep breathing, visualization and relaxation tools are powerful when it comes to having a positive birth. HypnoBirthing has helped not only me, but also hundreds of my client couples to have comfortable, natural births. But the...
Express Delivery
Not every labor is a marathon; some take only a few hours. But are these so-called precipitous births really abnormal, or are they more common than we think?Soon after I began assembling a bed frame, which I thought would be a good labor...
The Hard Science of Supporting Low-Tech Birth
Studies show that many interventions increase risk to mother and child instead of decreasing it. In fact, the most scientific birth is often the least technological one.When I ask my medical students to describe their image of a woman who...
