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walkitoutCheck out the cover on this standard text on obstetrics. One positive review, from a midwife. I am not commenting on the contents of this book, which may well be excellent (dunno -- I haven't looked at it myself). I am talking _only_ about the cover design.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0838576656/
(1) Why is it human? Men don't give birth. Before you say, well, they had to distinguish the species, think hard about what _that_ says.
(2) Notice that while there is a baby on the cover, there is no mother. Whoa. They _erased_ mom from the picture entirely. Spooky.
(3) While mom has been erased, the time lapsed drawing/diagram tells you exactly what position she is giving birth in. Take a good look -- it's almost certainly semi-sitting. (Either that, or lithotomy.)
Title does get points for saying labor and birth, not labor and delivery, hence it does actually describe work done by mom, rather than focussing primarily on the birth attendants activities (which would be delivery).
Yikes.
I think I'm going to get Robbie Davis-Floyd's book. She may be crazy, but it is increasingly difficult for me to think she's wrong.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0838576656/
(1) Why is it human? Men don't give birth. Before you say, well, they had to distinguish the species, think hard about what _that_ says.
(2) Notice that while there is a baby on the cover, there is no mother. Whoa. They _erased_ mom from the picture entirely. Spooky.
(3) While mom has been erased, the time lapsed drawing/diagram tells you exactly what position she is giving birth in. Take a good look -- it's almost certainly semi-sitting. (Either that, or lithotomy.)
Title does get points for saying labor and birth, not labor and delivery, hence it does actually describe work done by mom, rather than focussing primarily on the birth attendants activities (which would be delivery).
Yikes.
I think I'm going to get Robbie Davis-Floyd's book. She may be crazy, but it is increasingly difficult for me to think she's wrong.
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a. What do men giving birth have to do with whether the kid ends up being human? Is that a definition of humanity: having been gestated by a female? (I actually stopped to think long enough to change that last sentence from "having been birthed/whelped by a female," as I recall a classic definition of "not by woman born" to mean being delivered by C-section.)
b. I checked and found that in 1984 there was already a book called Labor and Birth, so they probably wanted to distinguish between titles.
My Issues
Date: 2005-05-11 06:36 pm (UTC)"Female Labor" would include all mammals and possibly egg laying critters as well; _Female Labor and Birth_ would leave out non-girl-babies. R. suggests the title was intended to be about human birth (boys and girls and those joyous middle possibilities so often left out of these discussions and then subjected to barbaric surgery without their consent) and unfortunately that crept to the beginning of the title (since _Labor and Human Birth_ sounded funny?). He suggested "Women's Labor and Human Birth" as an alternate that is both accurate and preserves parallelism. While some would prefer to define female humans under a certain calendar age as not-women but rather girls, I figure that if a girl can give birth, she should really be considered a woman, regardless of her calendar age and even if she thinks of herself as a girl more than as a woman. Or as a grrrl. Or whatever.
I'm making a big deal out of this largely because of the picture. Otherwise I'd have laughed at the title, but chalked it up to an innocent accident. Doesn't look so innocent with that pictures. (But that does not make it Harry's fault. I don't know who is responsible, and by all accounts, it's a worthy book.)
As for b., Oxorn's text is such a standard it was already in its fourth edition (under the same title) in 1980, before the book you found was even a gleam in Cecilia Worth's eyes (unless there was another '84 book called _Labor and Birth_ published with the same title which would be pretty darn funny, all things considered).
I actually realize that I sound like a wack job when I talk about this stuff. I get that everyone pretty much thinks I'm crazy. _I_ think I'm nuts when it comes to this stuff, and I'm a little appalled at how impossible it is for me to keep my mouth shut about it. But just 'cause I sound wacked does not mean what I am saying is wrong. The whole topic is soaked in bad craziness; sanity in this environment sounds bizarre and weird.
Oh, dear.
Date: 2005-05-11 07:18 pm (UTC)I hope you didn't infer that I was saying that you were wrong: I was honestly trying to figure out what your problem was with the title of the book. Okay, yeah -- it's a little weird, but there are a lot of books on birthing. On one side, we have Human Labor and Birth. On the other, we have Spiritual Midwifery -- sounds like the genre is bound to have eyebrow raising titles.
I definitely agree that the cover picture is a bit whacked: the kid looks like it's traveling to us through an alternate dimension. If the title hadn't obviously mentioned birth, I'd think it was probably something about quantum physics.
Re: Oh, dear.
Date: 2005-05-11 07:36 pm (UTC)If only it were something from quantum physics. In practice, it's a depiction of an ideal vertex presentation: head in the pelvis, occiput anterior -- back of the head to mom's front -- head is birthed, baby rotates in pelvis now facing to mom's right, rest of baby is born. Now that I take a better look at it, I strongly suspect this is an operative or assisted delivery, as the kids head looks more elongated after the shoulders are born. OTOH, that may just be because the perspective shifted.