Contact: Kim Wildner
Harbor & Hill Publishing
Tel: (231) 845-9473
Email
For too many women, birth has been a painful and frightening ordeal. Must it be so?
In the 1930's Dr. Grantley Dick Read first suggested birth could be painless without drugs.. In the 50's, Dr. Lamaze also tried to help women attain painless childbirth without drugs, and in the 1960's, Dr. Bradley picked up where his predecessors left off. Currently, Mongan Method HypnoBirthing(R) is the program that some women are using to have safer, more comfortable births. Yes, even painless!
Yet, in a recent survey of 1,600 women by The Maternity Center Association there were virtually no natural births, even though 45% stated they felt birth was a natural process that should not be interfered with unless absolutely necessary. Despite this high rate of intervention, maternal mortality (death) rates have not improved in 20 years, and prematurity rates have actually risen. The US has dropped from 24th to 28th in maternal morality in the last 10 years...we are now behind Cuba and Kuwait. Surgical births are on the rise with no improvements in outcomes. How could the facts be so clearly in conflict with the reality of women's experience?
West Michigan native, Kim Wildner, author of Mother's Intention: How Belief Shapes Birth with over a decade experience as a childbirth professional, thinks the answer lies in our cultural belief that birth is a dangerous medical event. Further, this erroneous core assumption affects birth whether it is held consciously or subconsciously. A faulty belief...one not supported by evidence but none-the-less treated as fact...means that each decision based on that belief will be flawed. Mother's Intention teaches parents to take a critical look at the beliefs they may hold as self-evident truths.
Wildner's varied experiences with birth uniquely qualify her to write on the subject. She has been a Certified Childbirth Educator with the Association of Labor Assistants and Childbirth Educators since 1991 (originally IHB/IBP) teaching hospitals couples almost exclusively, balancing her hospital labor support experience with a midwifery education. In 1993 she past the N.A.R.M. (North American Registry of Midwives) exam and has attended birth at home and in hospital, in the States and abroad, in capacities ranging from midwives assistant, to monitrice to primary birth attendant. After certification as a hypnotherapist and HypnoBirthing(R) practitioner in 2000, Wildner has turned her attention to the research required to complete the Better Birth Basics Series, of which Mother's Intention is one part.
Mother's Intention is available from Harbor & Hill Publishing, P.O. Box 265, Ludington, MI, 49431 for $19.95 plus tax and shipping. More information is available at Woman's Wisdom and order forms are available from Harbor & Hill .
