Ricki Lake Speaks Out about Natural Child Birth in a New Book: Your Best Birth

I loved The Business of Being Born and was happy to read that Ricki Lake and Abby Epstein have a new book out called Your Best Birth: Know all Your Options, Discover the Natural Choices and Take Back the Birth Experience (if any publishers or PR people are reading this-- please send me a copy to review!).

Here is an excerpt from the book posted on the Today show where she was a recent guest. In it she chronicles her first and second birth experiences and how different they were. One took place in a hospital and one was at home.

Here is a quote from the except, where Ricki shares how she started feeling after her hospital birth did not go as planned:

"Most women don’t really want to dwell on their birth experiences. You get this amazing gift of the baby. You’re on a high and whatever happened in the hospital just seems to fade away. Even if it didn’t go as planned, it was a pretty amazing experience. I feel blessed that, considering it all, I had a vaginal birth for my first child. And although Rob and I are now divorced, the memory of how he was on that day is one of the things I can draw on when I need a little encouragement to get over one of our postmarital spats. When the mommy- bonding hormones stopped coursing through my veins, I started to think about the birth, not just the baby. How quickly everything had changed direction. At the hospital, I felt like a problem. I wasn’t progressing fast enough, they said, even though my baby was never in distress. I remembered how when my mom came to see us at the hospital, I introduced her to my midwife saying, “Mom, here’s the woman who delivered my baby!” Sandy corrected me, “Ricki, you’re the one who delivered that baby.” Why couldn’t I shake this feeling that my body had betrayed me? Hadn’t this crazy system betrayed me? Keeping my prenatal appointments, eating my green, leafy vegetables, the vitamins, the yoga, the visualizations — all of it built a sense that this would be a birth of my own creation."

Women need choices, and they don't need to feel like they are under an artificial time table based on anyone's schedule but their own. I'm glad that Ricki Lake and Abby Epstein are adding their voices once again, in support of natural childbirth, and the empowerment of women to make their own choices based on the health of their babies, their values, and the trust that they have in their bodies to birth.