Never let it be said I can keep my mouth shut about my politics

[walkitout]

Check 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.

Comments

Oh, dear.

[byrdie.livejournal.com]

But just 'cause I sound wacked does not mean what I am saying is wrong.

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.

[walkitout]

The wackitude on the cover that looks like science fiction to you actually depicts an "erased" mother giving birth while reclined or flat on her back, probably, altho not necessarily, with her legs elevated and separated in stirrups. These positions compress the pelvis (that'd be the tight bony box the kid has to mold its head through to get out, which is why baby's skulls look so weird at birth) by about 30%. That is, makes a hard problem worse.

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.