for Mothers Day

A Mother’s Pledge to and Covenant with

Every Other Mother on

Mothers' Day

I will not raise my precious child to kill your precious child.

And if it is within my power, I will

not hand over my beloved child to others

to kill your beloved child, or

   to learn how to kill the one you cherish.

Why make such a pledge, and commit to such a covenant? Because the photo above—and worse—is what the weapons industry and their bought-and-paid-for deceitful politicians and mass media outlets are turning your child into today. Tomorrow they will turn your child into mud!

"You fasten the trigger for others to fire,

then sit back and watch.

When the death count gets higher,

you hide in your mansions,

As young people's blood

flows out of their bodies

and is buried in mud."     

                                                               —Masters of War

No child—including your child or grandchild—can protect himself or herself from the schemes and snares of the spiritually and mentally disordered adults who own and operate—for gigantic profits and for the perpetuation and protection of their own luxurious life styles—the corporate, military, media, academic and institutional-religion interlocking juggernauts, that brainwash children into the tinsel glories and sadistic pleasures of violence and war. Children's brains, and their stage of brain development, are helpless and hapless clumps of putty in such hands. If mothers do not protect their children, and every mother's child, from the brain and body destroying wickedness of these systematic, for profit child abusers, who will? Not the Church, Synagogue or Mosque! Not the state and its institutions, e.g., schools! And, most assuredly, not the corporate media! 

For the most part only the mother has the knowledge and courage, that comes from her bonding in love with her child from the first instance of her child’s existence, that can resist and override the incessant propaganda—regarding the nobility, pleasures and goodness of violence and war, which from early childhood onward is poured into the brains of most children by everything from parades to movies to TV shows to Young (8-12) Marine Uniformed Squads to video games, e.g., America's Army 3, Black Ops, Gears of War 3, Grand Theft Auto IV, etc. 

A perpetual warfare state requires a perpetual warfare economy as well as perpetual wars. All this can only be accomplished by having a bottomless pool of young boys and girls perpetually nurtured to find attractive, and therefore desirable, participation in what they unquestioningly believe to be a noble, holy, heroic, virtuous, indeed exalted, activity—war. No high-tech or low-tech stone is left unturned to do the child brainwashing-recruiting job thoroughly. And truth, being the first casualty of war, necessarily becomes the first casualty of recruiting for war. Lies about anything and everything—from God's will, to historical facts, to the consequences of combat, to veteran's benefits—abound in this nurturing-recruiting process from the cradle to the military swearing-in ceremony. The developing, but still critically underdeveloped, brain of the child-adolescent, usually possesses no developed mental abilities equal to the task of discerning or warding-off the war-directed neurological hard wiring process that he or she is unknowingly being subjected to by adult con artists—in the service of the states, the churches, the schools, the media and big money.

 Do ponder the systematic, ongoing brutalization of your child's mind and its future consequences for your child and for you, as well as for other mothers and their children. Then, ask yourself how important it is to you to protect your child from those who desire to turn him or her into their agent of violence and brutality in order to protect and enhance their agendas in this world? Again, if you do not protect your child from these mentally and spiritually disordered human beings who in their lust for power rapaciously prey on children, then you can be assured that the big shots who call the shots in the state, in commerce, in the media, in religious institutions and in academia will not only not lift a finger to protect them, they will do them great harm. They will, however, feign concern for your child ("I feel your pain”) and shed public crocodile tears and call your destroyed  child a hero when what is left of him or her comes home to you in a body bag or brain damaged, limbless or insane. 

We all live with failures and undone tasks. We all live with "It might have been”s. But surely, if there is any area where one would not want to have to say, “It might have been," this is it. Today, Mothers’ Day, take this pledge and make this commitment to yourself and to all other mothers—and then do what you see needs to be done to fulfill it. And, if not a single other person agrees with you, you will always know that you did, out of love for your child and love for other mothers and their children, what you could do to protect your child and them from the Masters of War and the Moneymakers of War—whether they be Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus or atheists, white, black, brown, yellow or red, American, British, French, German, Israeli, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Palestinian, Congolese, Russian, etc.

Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

P.S. Of course there is no possibility that the nurturing and hard wiring of a child's neurological pathways, in the fashion desired by the industrial weapons’ makers and those who serve them and live off of their largess, can be considered consistent with nurturing the mind of Christ in the child. Indeed, the change of mind (metanoia in Greek) that those who prey on the not yet fully developed brains of children and adolescents in order to turn them into future willing-killing instruments to serve their interests, is so incompatible with the change of mind (metanoia) that the Jesus of the Gospels teaches and calls for in His disciples, that it can be said, they are as far apart as hell is from Heaven.

War is indeed hell. So protect your child, and the children of other mothers like yourself, from those who wish to form his or her brain in a way that will eventually make your child desire to run into the arms of those, who without giving it a second thought, would throw your infinitely precious and beloved son or daughter into hell.

The First Mothers’ Day Proclamation

                                                                                     -Julia Ward Howe (1870) 


Arise, then, women of this day!

Arise, all women who have hearts,

whether your baptism be that of water or tears!

Say firmly:

"We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies.

Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage,

             for caresses and applause.

Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn

     all that we have taught them of charity, mercy and patience.

We women of one country will be too tender of those of another

to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

 composed by Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

The Data All Guilt-Ridden Parents Need What science tells us about breast-feeding, sleep training and the other agonizing decisions of parenthood.

RE: The New York Times, Opinion Dept.
by Dr. Emily Oster
published on April 19, 2019

The Data All Guilt-Ridden Parents Need:

What science tells us about breast-feeding, sleep training and the other agonizing decisions of parenthood.

My Introduction Here: I can't resist a challenge, and this article was one. My commentary will appear at the end of Dr. Oster's (long) article. I hope my words might bring some sanity back into the conversation. Feel free to add your own thoughts here, too. My email address will be listed at the end.

Here goes....

In 1980, 8.6 percent of first births were to women over 30; by 2015 this was 31 percent. This is more than an interesting demographic fact. It means that many of us are having children much later than our parents did. By the time a baby arrives, many of us have been through school, spent time in the working world, developed friendships, hobbies. And through all of these activities, we have probably grown used to the idea that if we work harder — at our jobs, at school, at banking that personal record in the half marathon — we can achieve more.

Babies, however, often do not respond to a diligent work ethic. Take, as an example, crying.

When my daughter, Penelope, was an infant, she was typically inconsolable between 5 and 8 p.m. I’d walk her up and down the hall, sometimes just crying (me crying, that is — obviously she was crying). I once did this in a hotel — up and down, up and down, Penelope screaming at the top of her lungs. I hope no one else was staying there. I tried everything — bouncing her more, bouncing her less, bouncing with swinging, bouncing with nursing (difficult). Nothing worked; she would eventually just exhaust herself.

I wondered whether this was normal. I’m an economist, someone who works with data. I wrote a book on using data to make better choices during pregnancy; it was natural for me to turn to the data again once the baby arrived.

And here, faced with crying, I found that the data was helpful. We often say babies are “colicky,” but researchers have an actual definition of colic (three hours of crying, more than three days a week, for more than three weeks) and some estimates of what share of babies fit this description (about 2 percent). But the same data can also tell us that many babies cry just a bit less than that, and almost 20 percent of parents report their baby “cries a lot.” So I was not alone. The data also told me the crying would get better, which it eventually did.

But I also found, more so than in pregnancy, that there are limits to the utility of general information. Parenting is full of decisions, nearly all of which can be agonized over. You can and should learn about the risks and benefits of your parenting choices, but in the end you have to also think about your family preferences — about what works for you.

Breast-Feeding

Take breast-feeding. When I was pregnant and I imagined myself breast-feeding, I usually pictured myself out to brunch with some friends. When the baby was hungry I’d pop on my color-coordinated nursing cover, and she’d latch right on while I enjoyed my mascarpone French toast.

This is not what it was like at all. Like many women, I found breast-feeding incredibly hard. I have one particularly vivid memory of trying to nurse my screaming daughter in a 100-degree closet at my brother’s wedding.

These struggles are made worse by the societal, familial and medical testimonies to the many benefits of breast-feeding. Here, for example, is a partial list of supposed benefits to breast-feeding, culled from medical sources and less official parenting resources: smarter babies with less diarrhea and asthma, fewer ear infections, and a lower risk of obesity and diabetes, and thinner, happier moms with better friendships.

Better friendships? Don’t get me wrong — motherhood can be lonely and isolating, and meeting other moms is a great idea. That’s what stroller yoga is for. But I’m hard-pressed to figure out which of my friendships were enhanced by my attempts to feed a screaming baby in a closet.

Many of the benefits cited here do, however, have some basis in evidence, just not always especially good evidence. And even when the evidence is good, the benefits are smaller than many people realize. This is where being an economist comes in handy.

Most studies of breast-feeding are biased by the fact that women who breast-feed are typically different from those who do not. In the United States, and most developed countries, more educated and richer women are more likely to nurse their babies. This is the result of a host of factors, chief among them a lack of universal maternal supports.

Having more education and resources is, of course, linked to better outcomes for infants and children independent of breast-feeding. This makes it very difficult to establish the causal effect of breast-feeding — whether, for an individual woman, nursing her baby will make the child better off.

Some of the best evidence on breast-feeding comes from the Promotion of Breast-Feeding Intervention, or Probit, study, a large randomized trial from the 1990s run in Belarus, in which some of the mothers received breast-feeding guidance and support and some didn’t. Based on this data, the most well-supported benefits of breast-feeding are lower risks of gastrointestinal infections (with symptoms like diarrhea or vomiting) and of rashes and eczema early in life. To put some numbers to it, the study found that of the babies of a group of mothers encouraged to breast-feed, 9 percent had at least one episode of diarrhea, compared with 13 percent of the children of mothers who weren’t encouraged to breast-feed. The rate for rashes and eczema was 3 percent versus 6 percent.

Yet the study found no effect on respiratory infections, including ear infections, croup and wheezing. So why do we continue to see the “evidence-based” claim that breast-feeding reduces colds and ear infections? The main reason is there are many observational studies that do show that breast-feeding affects these illnesses.

For example, an observational study of nearly 70,000 Danish mothers and their children published in 2016 found that breast-feeding more than six months reduced the risk of an ear infection from 7 percent to 5 percent. This study was very careful, with excellent data that allowed the authors to adjust for a lot of differences across mothers and children.

But observational studies are less convincing than randomized trials because they have a harder time establishing causality. Should we give any weight to this evidence if we have the Probit trial?

On one hand, randomized evidence is clearly better. On the other hand, the Probit trial is only one study. If there are small benefits from breast-feeding, they might not show up as significant effects in a randomized trial, but we would still like to know about them. Given the weight of the evidence, I’d put the link between breast-feeding and a small reduction in ear infections in the “plausible” category. But there is nothing as compelling on colds and coughs.

What about long-term benefits, and the claims that breast-fed kids will grow up to be thinner, healthier and smarter? One woman told me her doctor had warned her that by quitting breast-feeding, she was costing her child three I.Q. points.

Let’s return from the land of magical breast milk to reality. Even in the most optimistic view about breast-feeding, the impact on I.Q. is small. Breast-feeding isn’t going to increase your child’s I.Q. by 20 points. How do we know? Because if it did, it would be really obvious in the data and in everyday life.

The question, really, is whether breast-feeding gives children some small leg up in intelligence. If you believe studies that just compare kids who are breast-fed to those who are not, you’ll find that it does. There is a clear correlation here — breast-fed kids do seem to have higher I.Q.s.

But again, this isn’t the same as saying that breast-feeding causes the higher I.Q. One study of Scandinavian 5-year-olds found that children who nursed longer had cognitive scores that were nearly 8 points higher on average. But their mothers were also richer, had more education and had higher I.Q. scores. Once the authors adjusted for even a few of these variables, the effects were much smaller.

In fact, the most compelling studies on this compare siblings, one of whom was breast-fed and the other not; these find no significant differences in I.Q. This same type of sibling study has also looked at obesity and, again, found little to no impact.

The good news for guilt-ridden moms is that there is little convincing evidence for any long-term effects like these. The Probit researchers followed the children in the trial through the age of 6½. They found no change in allergies or asthma, cavities, height, blood pressure, weight, or indicators for being overweight or obese.

If you’re a mother trying to decide whether breast-feeding is worth it or not, there’s one more piece of data you should take into account: the possible effects on your own health.

A lot of the claimed benefits of breast-feeding are about mothers, and many are bogus. Breast-feeding doesn’t seem to promote much additional weight loss or provide free birth control. There is no evidence linking breast-feeding and friendship quality.

However, there is real evidence for a link between breast-feeding and cancers, in particular breast cancer. Across a wide variety of studies, there seems to be a sizable effect — perhaps a 20 percent to 30 percent reduction in the risk of breast cancer for women who breast-feed for longer than 12 months. In addition, the case for causality is bolstered by a concrete set of mechanisms. Researchers suggest that breast-feeding changes some aspects of the cells of the breast, which make them less susceptible to carcinogens.

After all that focus on the benefits of breast-feeding for kids, it may be that the most important long-term impact is actually on the health of the mother. Moms often feel selfish for thinking about their own wants and needs when faced with decisions about their kids. In this case, the data gives you permission to put yourself first for once.
Sleep Training

There are other fraught parenting decisions for which the evidence is much easier to understand than it is for breast-feeding. One example is sleep training.

Sleep training — colloquially, the “cry it out” technique — refers to any system where you leave the baby in his crib on his own at the start of the night, and sometimes let him fall back to sleep on his own if he wakes during the night. The name refers to the fact that if you do this, your baby will cry some. Pediatricians often recommend sleep training, and many parents do it.

But go on the internet, and you’ll find many articles detailing the extensive long-term damage sleep training will do to your child. At its core, the concern from the opponents of “cry it out” is that your baby will feel abandoned and, as a result, struggle to form attachments to you, and ultimately to anyone else.

This idea comes, perhaps surprisingly, from 1980s Romania, where thousands of children lived in orphanages with very little human contact for months or even years. One of the things visitors noticed in these places was the eerie quiet. Babies didn’t cry, because they knew no one would come. The argument is that “cry it out” does the same thing.

This is absurd. Sleep training methods do not leave the infant for months without any human contact, nor do they suggest subjecting children to the other types of physical and emotional abuse that occurred in those orphanages.

To learn about the impact of sleep training, we need to study it in the way it is actually used. Fortunately, many people have, and in a lot of those cases they used randomized trials.

Consider an Australian study of 328 mothers whose 7-month-old babies were having problems sleeping. Approximately half were assigned to do a sleep-training regimen, and the others were not. In the short term, the authors found significant benefits: The intervention improved sleep for children and also lowered parental depression. But they didn’t stop there.

They returned to evaluate the children a year later and five years later, when the children were 6. In this later follow-up, which included a subset of the original families, the researchers found no difference in any outcomes, including emotional stability and conduct behavior, stress, parent-child closeness, conflict or parent-child attachment. Basically, the kids who were sleep-trained looked exactly like those who were not.

These results are not an outlier. Review studies of sleep-training interventions do not find negative effects on infants. And many show sizable improvements in maternal depression and family functioning. Sleep affects mood, and parents who sleep less feel worse. The evidence paints a pretty pro-“cry it out” picture.

Nonetheless there are academic articles that argue against it. One small study that gets a lot of play shows that in the few days after sleep training, mothers are less stressed, but the same is not true of infants. The researchers interpret this as a signal that the mothers and children are losing emotional touch with each other, but this is a stretch. Why not interpret the evidence to say that cry-it-out relaxes parents without hurting children?

Fundamentally, the argument against sleep training is theoretical: that some children are devastated, even if those results don’t show up in the data, or that the damage may not manifest until babies are adults.

I think it is fair to say that it would be good to have more data. It’s always good to have more data! However, the idea that this uncertainty should lead us to avoid sleep training is flawed. Among other things, you could easily argue the opposite: Maybe sleep training is very good for some kids — they really need the uninterrupted sleep — and there is a risk of damaging your child by not sleep training.

Does this mean you should definitely sleep train? Of course not — every family is different, and you may not want to let your baby cry. But if you do want to sleep train, you should not feel shame or discomfort about that decision.
‘Working Moms’

Finally, there are some parenting decisions where the data just isn’t much help at all, and family preferences have to take the front seat. One example is the question of whether to work outside the home.

This decision is stressful. It often seems to define your whole parenting persona: What kind of mom are you? Are you a “stay-at-home mom” or, as the child of one of my friends once described her, a “stay-at-work mom”? Language like this is never helpful, and even less so when it frames this decision in such a gendered and heteronormative way. What if Dad stays home? What if there are two moms? Or only one parent?

Really, this decision could be better stated as: “What is the optimal configuration of adult work hours for your household?” Less catchy, but more helpful.


If you try to look to the evidence on what is “best” for children, you’ll be disappointed. There are studies of this, of course, but they’re hard to learn anything from, because it is extremely difficult to separate a family’s circumstances from decisions about employment. A 2008 meta-analysis found that children in families where one parent worked part-time and the other full-time performed best in school — better than children with two parents working full-time and better than those with one parent who didn’t work at all.

But again this is probably a result of many differences between those families, not just the mothers’ career decisions. There is really no compelling evidence that proves that having a stay-at-home parent affects child outcomes, positively or negatively.

(There is reliable evidence that time at home in a baby’s first few months is beneficial, but that is an argument for longer maternity leave, not for not working at all.)

This means that the decision really comes down to what works for your family. One part of this is obviously your budget, but the other part is your preferences.

I work because I like to. I love my kids! They are amazing. But I wouldn’t be happy staying home with them. It isn’t that I like my job better — if I had to pick, the kids would win every time. But the “marginal value” of time with them declines fast. (“Marginal value” will be familiar to anyone who remembers their Econ 101. There may not be any useful data on this question, but economic theory still comes in handy.) The first hour with my kids is great, but by the fourth, I’m ready for some time with my research. My job doesn’t have this nose-dive in marginal value — the highs are not as high, but the hour-to-hour satisfaction declines much more slowly.

It should be O.K. to say this. Just like it should be O.K. to say that you stay home with your kids because that is what you want to do. In our attempts to focus so much on what is best for our kids, it is a good idea to step back and think about what works for you.
And Everything Else

These decisions — breast-feeding, sleep training, working — are just three of many that will come up in the first year of a child’s life. More await, from co-sleeping to screen time and more.

One day, your child will have a temper tantrum. How on earth do you deal with that? Exorcism? And what about potty training? You may find your child is one of a surprisingly large share (about 1 in 5) who refuse to poop in the toilet (it has a name: “stool toileting refusal”). In your pre-child life, you probably never thought about the question of how to encourage someone to poop in a particular location. But there you are, needing to find your way.

That lady on the internet comment board wants to tell you what to do, but she doesn’t live in your house, and she cannot know what is right for your family.

I’m not trying to give advice. I’m just arguing that in many cases the data can be helpful. But if the data falls short and you still want advice, let me pass along something our pediatrician once told me. It was our 2-year-old’s checkup, and I had my usual list of neuroses.

“We are going on this vacation, and there are bees,” I said. “It’s kind of isolated. What if Penelope is stung? She’s never been stung before. What if she’s allergic? How will I get her to a doctor in time? Should I bring something to be prepared for this? Should we test her in advance? Do I need an EpiPen?”

In other words, I had built up this elaborate and incredibly unlikely scenario in my head. I needed someone to remind me that yes, this could happen. But so could a million other things. Parenting is not actually about planning for every possible disaster.

The doctor paused. And then she said, very calmly:

“Hmm. I’d probably just try not to think about that.”

Emily Oster, an economics professor at Brown, is the author of “Expecting Better” and the forthcoming “Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, From Birth to Preschool,” from which this essay is adapted.

***

My commentary here:

Marriage

About 40 to 50 percent of married couples in the United States divorce. The divorce rate for subsequent marriages is even higher.The median length for a marriage in the US today is 11 years with 90% of all divorces being settled out of court. However, studies have shown that lower-income couples are currently more likely to get a divorce than higher-income couples. I am not sure marriage is such a good idea.  Guess you shouldn't get married....

Pregnancy

About 10 to 20 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage. But the actual number is likely higher because many miscarriages occur so early in pregnancy that a woman doesn't realize she's pregnant. Stillbirth affects about 1 in 100 pregnancies each year in the United States; this is about 1 percent of all pregnancies and about 24,000 babies. Guess we shouldn't get pregnant...

Infant Death
World wide, of the 8.2 million under-five child deaths per year, about 3.3 million occur during the neonatal period —in the first four weeks of life. The majority - almost 3 million of these - die within one week and almost 2 million on their first day of life. Today in the U.S., more than 2,000 babies die of SIDS every year, according to government figures.

The U.S. is a worse place for newborns than 68 other countries, including Egypt, Turkey and Peru, according to a report released Tuesday by Save the Children. A million babies die every year globally on the same day they were born, including more than 11,000 American newborns.

According to the Center for Disease Control, approximately 12,000 children and young adults, ages 1 to 19 years, die from unintentional injuries each year in the U.S. Guess we should rethink this too....

***

I think you get the message which is, we can quantify, analyse, and apply every statistic available, but people, REALLY? Our babies don't come off a conveyor belt at birth, ready to evolve along with the rest of the world, at the same ratio as say, technology. They are in fact born expecting--hardwired, if you will--the same environment that they had in the womb. They are actually more immature than most other mammalian species, and, by the way, we are the only mammal that has ever asked, "What should I feed my baby and where should my baby sleep?"

My answer to Dr. Oster and other economists,  statisticians, and scientists is that our babies and parenting norms should never come under the heading of statistics at all, nor should statistics have such a major part in the conversation concerning their needs. We are our baby mammals' only and entire world. They have no one else. My decisions as to all aspects of their care and nurture must come from instinct and my heart alone. If I bond from the beginning I will continue to know what is best for my baby. Advice comes from others who have discovered what works best for babies, An old saying goes: Two Jewish grandmothers are better than one pediatrician. 

Bio

From the editor:
Midwife-turned-author, Stephanie Sorensen seems to swim seamlessly through cultures, religions, superstitions, raw fear and ecstasy to the first breath of a new baby. She invites her readers to join her, taking us on a tour to the innermost workings of another world. She lives among one of the most diverse populations on earth, and has given birth to a book that takes us on a bizarre journey, giving us a rare, intimate glimpse into her daily life. With graphic prose we enter with her into the Land of Birth. Midwife, mother, grandmother, doula, world traveler and author, Sorensen lives and breathes birth. She has five children scattered around the world, grandchildren

and over a thousand babies she calls her own, even when she cannot pronounce their names correctly. With stories so graphic you will feel your own contractions again, she guides us through her world of Amish bedrooms, hospital labor rooms, birthing suites, and operating theaters. Get your scrubs on. It's time to push!

Ma Doula, A Story Tour of Birth, North Star Press, St. Cloud, MN, won as a finalist in the Midwest Book Awards, 2016.

comments may be sent to ssskimchee@gmail.com

An Annotated Bibliography Here

General Resource

Videos

1.      1. a must see: elephant giving birth in Bali (one of Ina May's favorite videos)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Otpwcu3UGw
2.  “Birth Story: Ina May Gaskin & The Farm Midwives,” 2012, directed by Sara Lamm and Mary Wigmore. (DVD)
3. “Breast Crawl by UNICEF” http://www.breastcrawl.org/video.shtml a must see!
4. “Breastfeeding: the Why-to, How-to, Can-do Videos”—Vida health communications. www.vida-health.com
5.  “The Business of Being Born” with Abby Epstein and Ricki Lake. (DVD) (See also “More Business of Being Born,” the 4-part continuation of the series.)
6.  “Christian dads experience what it feels like to give birth”—one for your partner! (Youtube)
7.    “Doula”—about Loretha Weisinger’s work with teens. (Netflix)
8. “Doula: a documentary”—produced in 2012 by Childbirth Collective in Minneapolis and Emily Rumsey. http://www.emilyrumsey.com
9. “The dramatic Struggle for Life”—very amazing footage from Bali.
10. “Everybody Loves . . . Babies” by thomas Balmes. (DVD/(Youtube))
11.  “Extraordinary Breastfeeding” a five-part online video series, these videos give real food for thought! (Youtube)
12. “Guerrilla Midwife”—follow CNN hero of the Year Ibu Robin Lim into the trenches of her work from Bali, where hemorrhage after childbirth is a leading cause of death, into the tsunami disaster zone in Aceh, where her battle is fought with only one weapon, love.
13. “Thalasso Bain Bebe par Sonia Rochel”—Baby bath by Brazilian midwife Sonia Rochel (Youtube)
14. “Twin Vertex Birth”—the birth of the author’s twins at The Farm in 1982, with Ina May Gaskin. (DVD)

Internet Resourcesa

11.  askdrSears.com—valuable advice on breastfeeding and parenting (my personal favorite)

22.   Breastfeeding resource pages—Leche League Lnternational. www.llli.org/nb.html

34.  Caroline Flint, U.K. Midwife website: http://carolineflintmidwife.tumblr. com/

45. DONA International website: information on doula training, certification and Doula Magazine. http://www.dona.org

56.  Ina May Gaskin’s homepage: http://inamay.com/

67.  The Newman Breastfeeding Clinic, the Centre for Breastfeeding Education, and the Centre for Breastfeeding Studies: http://www.nbci.ca You can call them for help anytime too: 416-498-0002 a connection to an amazing group in Canada with seemingly endless information—all excellent.

  8. Ongoing blog: callthedoula.blogspot.com

Books

1.     Attatchment Parenting: Instinctive care for your baby and young child, by Katie Allison Granju

2.     Babies, Breastfeeding and Bonding, by Ina May Gaskin

3.     Baby-led Breasetfeeding, by Gill Rapley and Tracey Murkett

4.     Birth Matters: a Midwife’s Manifesta, by Ina May Gaskin

5.     The Birth Partner: a Complete Guide to Childbirth for Dads, Doulas, and All Other Labor Companions, revised 4th ed, by Penny Simkin

6.     The Birth Partner: Everything You Need to Know to Help a Woman Through Childbirth, by Penny Simpkin

7.     Birth—Through Children’s Eyes, by Penny Simkin

8.     Breastfeeding and Natural Child Spacing: How Ecological Breastfeeding Spaces Babies, by Sheila Kippley

9.     The Breastfeeding Answer Book, by La Leche League International

10.  Breastfeeding Matters: What We Need to Know About Infant Feeding, by Maureen Kathryn Minchin

11.  Comfort Measures for Childbirth, by Penny Simkin

12.  The Continuum Concept: In search of happiness lost, by Jean Liedloff – my all-time favorite book!

13.  Do Birth: a gentle guide to labour and childbirth, by Carolyn flint

14.  Hold Your Premie, by Jill and Dr. Nils Bergman

15.  Ina May's Guide to Breastfeeding, by Ina May Gaskin

16.  Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth, by Ina May Gaskin

“The midwife considers the miracle of childbirth as normal, and leaves it alone unless there's trouble. The obstetrician normally sees childbirth as trouble; if he leaves it alone, it's a miracle.” ~ Sheila Stubbs

17.  The Labor Progress Handbook: Early Interventions to Prevent and Treat Dystocia, by Penny Simkin

18.  Ma Doula: A Story Tour of Birth, by Stephanie Sorensen

19.  Medications and Mothers’ Milk, 14th ed., by Thomas W. Hale

20.  Mothering the New Mother, by Sally Placksin

21.  The NAPSAC Directory of Alternative Birth Services and Consumer Guide, by Penny Simkin

22.  Natural Health After Birth, by Aviva Jill Romm

23.  The Nursing Mother’s Herbal, by Sheila Humphrey

24.  Parenting Without Borders: Surprising Lessons Parents Around the World Can Teach Us, by Christine Gross-Loh

25.  The Politics of Breastfeeding, by Gabrielle Palmer

26.  Pregnancy, Childbirth and the Newborn, by Penny Simkin

27.  Saving Babies? The Consequences of Newborn Genetic Screening, by Stefan Timmermans and Mara Buchbinder

28.  The Simple Guide to Having a Baby, by Penny Simkin

29.  The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, by Anne Fadiman

30.  Spiritual Midwifery, by Ina May Gaskin

31.  The Tender Gift: Breastfeeding, by Dana Raphael

32.  Testing Baby: The Transformation of Newborn Screening, Parenting, and Policymaking, by Rachel Grob

33.  The Ultimate Breastfeeding Book of Answers: The Most Comprehensive Problem-Solution Guide to Breastfeeding from the Foremost Expert in North America by Jack Newman and Teresa Pitman

34.  When Survivors Give Birth: Understanding and Healing the Effects of Early Sexual Abuse on Childbearing Women, by Penny Simkin

35.  The Womanly art of Breastfeeding, by La Leche League International

36.  Waiting With Gabriel: a Story of Cherishing a Baby's Brief Life, by Amy Kuebelbeck

Resources for Mothers of Multiples

Internet

Gina Osher is “The Twin Coach” in Los Angeles. She bravely writes about some of the uneven feelings that twin parents may experience in hopes of helping other moms who are having the same challenges. See: http://www.thetwincoach.com/

community.babycenter.com/post/a26537489/

www.everydayfamily.com Raising Twins or Multiples

www.netplaces.com › Twins, Triplets, and More

www.rookiemoms.com/twins-week-bonding-with-each-child/‎

www.twinslist.org/coping5.html

Books about twins:

1.     Chicken Soup for the Soul, Twins and More: 101 Stories Celebrating Double Trouble and Multiple Blessings by Susan M. Heim, Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen

2.     Double Duty: The Parent's Guide to Raising Twins, from Pregnancy through the School Year by Christina Baglivi Tinglof

3.     Entwined Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us About Human Behavior by Nancy L. Segal

4.     Everything You Need to Know to Have a Healthy Twin Pregnancy by Gila Leiter with Rachel Kranz

5.     Having Twins And More by Elizabeth Noble

6.     Hello Twins by Charlotte Voake

7.     It's Twins!: Parent-to-Parent Advice from Infancy through Adolescence by Susan M. Heim

8.     Little Miss Twins by Roger Hargreaves

9.     Mothering Multiples: Breastfeeding & Caring for Twins or More! by Karen Kerhoff Gromada

10.  National Geographic: In the Womb - Multiples DVD by Lorne Townend

11.  Parenting School-Age Twins and Multiples by Christina Tinglof

12.  Raising Twins: Parenting Multiples from Pregnancy Through the School Years by Shelly Vaziri Flais, MD, FAAP

13.  Ready or Not... Here We Come!: The REAL Experts' Guide to the First Year with Twins by Elizabeth Lyons

14.  Take Two!: A Celebration of Twins by J. Patrick Lewis and Jane Yolen

15.  The Art of Parenting Twins: The Unique Joys and Challenges of Raising Twins and Other Multiples by Patricia Maxwell Malmstorm and Janet Poland

16.  The Everything Twins, Triplets, and More Book by Pamela Fierro

17.  Twins 101: 50 Must-Have Tips for Pregnancy through Early Childhood From Doctor M.O.M. by Khanh-Van Le-Bucklin

18.  Twinspiration: Real-Life Advice from Pregnancy Through the First Year by Cheryl Lage

19.  What to Expect When You're Expecting by Heidi Murkoff

20.  When You're Expecting Twins, Triplets, or Quads: Proven Guidelines for a Healthy Multiple Pregnancy by Barbara Luke

There are many more books and valuable web sites out there. Mothers of Multiples groups are springing up all over, too. If there isn’t one near you, start one!