You'd think that between Erykah Badu's home-birth twitter and Ricki Lake's film success and the New York Times coverage that we'd moved beyond dissing home birth as fringe -- "extreme." Apparently not. The current New York magazine titles a feature about it "Extreme Birth." The piece, by...

Dear Christina,

I know, I know. You must be getting tons of advice about pregnancy, motherhood, and everything else right now. You get the bump, and suddenly everybody feels like butting in. So my apologies straight off for joining the choir. Let me also say that making babies, having babies,...

I have little Anglo-envy: the rain is dreadful, the beer is flat, and the pound is whooping my dollar's ass. But in the case of maternity care, I can understand my American friend Jo's sentiment, "Thank God I'm not trying to do this in the States!" She's married to a...

If you care about a "woman's right to choose," then you need to know about a little situation ongoing in Missouri. Yes, abortion is still legal there. It's not that situation (not today, anyway). This is about a woman's right to choose a midwife.

Independent midwives, called Certified Professional...

There was no press release, no formal announcement. Without fanfare the mayor of New York launched a $2 million initiative this spring to encourage breastfeeding, first by banning the maternity ward ritual of handing out free baby formula samples to mothers. I only caught wind of the plan because Jennifer...

This may sound odd, but I really want to try childbirth. I felt this urge after the first birth I witnessed, and I think it was the desired effect of the The Business of Being Born, a powerful documentary about the politics of childbirth that premiered last week at...