Birth: Countdown to Optimal

Brilliant - informative, moving, challenging and educational. The stories about c-sections are particularly moving, especially where one woman describes a feeling of being burgled! This is nicely balanced with a positive story of a c-section, which demonstrates that high risk women can have a positive birthing experience, even in a medicalised environment. The section describing what happens week-by-week is fantastic and I have not seen such detail in a book or paper written by a non-medical/midwifery person. The detail is perfect and written at a pitch which anyone can appreciate. I think this section is invaluable for student nurses, midwives and junior doctors. Life in utero is described extremely sensitively and much more meaningfully than in most pregnancy books. The photos are also lovely. I would recommend this book to anyone as I feel it gives more than the average clichéd information that most childbirth books offer. --Was Head of Midwifery for 3 large hospitals. Now working for a private company/charity within the midwifery sector

BIRTH: Countdown to Optimal is a wonderful book for a pregnant woman (and her partner and family) to dip into. Written in a deliberately user-friendly style, it's a bit like a really juicy magazine. It's pitched just right for pregnancy reading. There is nothing to frighten a pregnant woman or cause her undue anxiety. This is a book that absolutely celebrates the normality of birth and the joy of welcoming a new life into family and community. It is completely authentic, full of personal stories and evidence that lots of families and the author herself have truly experienced. It is also a truly scholarly work that weaves in the universal truths of birth physiology and research evidence while encouraging, inspiring and informing women. Professionals, as well as families, have so much to gain from its pages. Reading the accounts in this book will help us all to better understand the discretion we need to have around the pregnant and birthing mother, so as not to disturb her highly sensitive physiological responses and the delicate hormonal secretions that characterise birth amongst all mammals, including humans. We would know and respect this around a mother cat or dog giving birth and would certainly hesitate to disturb what was going on, but we are ignorant of this around human mothers. This is a symptom of how alienated we have become from our essentially animal nature. When you open this book at first it's like opening a happy family album. Loving and joyful faces illuminate the text, like snapshots rather than commissioned birth photographs. The warmth of home and hearth as the best place for most women to give birth is clear. This gives us more than a clue that the true nature of birth is essentially wrapped within the love of mother and father, in happy families and healthy communities. This is a very important book for our times, when we sure have got this whole process of birth wrong. I heartily congratulate Sylvie for her passion and all the work that went into compiling and writing this book. --Janet Balaskas, author and founder of the Active Birth Centre in London

This book is special. It's full of accounts we can learn from. Usually, I recommend that pregnant women should not read too many books. I tell them they should rest their intellect, listen to the music they love, go swimming, do whatever it is they like to do. That's much more important. They don't need to know too much because they lose their sense of proportion. If they read a medical dictionary they will find all sorts of... well... But this book is an exception. It's a book written by a mother with experience of undisturbed birth, who knows what birth can be like. And that s different. It's unusual. --Michel Odent, obstetrician, home birth midwife and researcher