Hw #38

" But the next moment an army of nurses and doctors pushed past the curtain, propelling a stretcher ahead of them. Zelda's cries and grunts had been heard, and within half a minute they wrestled her onto the stretcher and whisked her toward the delivery room. She screamed and kicked and begged to leave her alone, but there were too many of them. I followed them. I followed like lifeline, a way out, a piece of floating debris on a stormy ocean." - pg. 22

Baby Catcher

By Peggy Vincent

This book is organized in the author telling her life story from starting as a nurse to a midwife and the pregnancies she saw along the way and new things she learned about them every new time. The major question this book is trying to answer along the way so far is her figuring what is better hospital birth or home birth and she seems to see home birth in simple words more “natural” unless serious complications come up.

The major insight the book wants the author to take away so far is how different home birth and hospital birth are and so specifically that during her retelling of several of her pregnancy stories I feel like I’m there when mother is in labor, can only imagine the pain the woman feels, the terror she feels when doctor’s and assistants disrupt her instinctive feelings to instead be laid flat and drugged up and even the moment Peggy catches the newborn baby seems like most beautiful thing to her, when before reading this book believed it was a simple no thought process.

Interesting aspect of pregnancy and birth that I believe deserves public attention is that from all the pregnancy she talks about every single one is different. One person had baby on stairs while one in bathtub and another on all fours. This is important aspect because sometimes soon to be moms listen to the stories of friends and mother but it does not mean her pregnancy or giving birth will be the same, so future moms do NOT freak out. I of course after this unit am definitely scared of this whole process before all I thought was “yep I will one day have kids, no stress… yea right!” but has helped me become more informed about this whole process and hopefully help me make me the right decisions when I in the far future will want children.

Her evidence is her personal experience to support her arguments and is reliable I believe because I’d think I’d be pretty hard to make up the whole process of so many women first hand. The evidence sometimes does stall the book a bit but it also helps reader see many different births.