Natural Birth Secrets: An Insiders Guide on How To Give Birth Holistically, Healthfully and Safely, and Love the Experience!

by Anne Margolis

Whether you have visions of a cozy home water birth, giving birth in a birth center free of pain meds and intervention, or a hospital birth with the latest technology and emergency care access just in case—Natural Birth Secrets provides the ultimate pregnancy-to-postpartum training. Throughout this book, you will find a unique approach on how to have the most healthy, deeply positive, and empowered journey through pregnancy, birth, and becoming a mama postpartum. You will learn how to optimize your fertility preconception, natural healthful living, holistic modalities for common issues and ailments, and the pros and cons of routine interventions to help you make informed decisions along the way. The more you are empowered, the healthier and happier an experience you will have. These insights come from Anne Margolis’s learning, training, and support of thousands of women, babies, and their families from 24+ years in her midwifery practice. With Anne’s “insider secrets”, you increase your likelihood of avoiding health issues, high rates of risky medical and surgical interventions, and serious complications, including birth trauma for you and your baby—so that you can have the birth of your dreams. Women warriors—take your time learning these lessons to develop your plan from an emotional, physical, and spiritual perspective to relax into birth and mamahood with optimal wellbeing, excitement, and ease.

671 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 12, 2018

Reviews

[Phaedon · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is terribly written. In fact, I doubt that an editor has ever been near it. It's full of typos, grammatical errors, repetition and even the author's strike throughs on passages that were clearly supposed to be removed but weren't before publishing.

Perhaps more importantly it's just full of fluff and brazen assertion with no supporting evidence. It's not that I doubt that the author has plenty of wisdom to share, or that many of the ideas are correct. It's just that one has to wade through enormous volumes of fluff to find them. The author also couldn't be bothered to cite any evidence for any claims made, despite introducing the work as "evidence based".

Don't buy this book.

[Trine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read the e-book version of this book. Maybe the print version was better edited; the inconsistency in style drove me nuts (e.g. different use of punctuation throughout; swtiching from "mama" to "momma" half-way through, etc.), there were repeated sections, numbered headers that never referred to anything, and occasional lack of citing sources, especially on statistics... It sometimes read as though it was a series of online articles or blog posts that had been strung together, and someone forgot to clean them up before hitting "publish".

That said, I thought the content was alright. It's a book that's easy to read, and though there are sections that I think aren't as fleshed out or detailed as they could have been, it covered a broad range of topics from pre-pregnancy to post-partum and I learned something new from most of them, which is why I've still given it 3 stars (I think there is plenty of information relevant to those who know next to nothing about pregnancy and the American system). It's very American focused, which makes sense, but it means there are sections that aren't relevant to e.g. European readers because the systems are so different.

I do wish so much of the book hadn't been dedicated to plugging the author's own services and products (a large handful of pages throughout the book, which for me is disproportional, especially when it could have been covered in the appendix). I wonder if this is an American thing, since I see it more often in books by American authors, but I always skip those parts.

All in all - worth the one-time read, will probably be quite useful and interesting to American mums, a lot of parts not super useful for me (Danish mum living in the Netherlands) except it reminded me to take better care of myself and how, which got me to explore new topics, and for that I'm grateful.