Open Season: A Survival Guide for Natural Childbirth and VBAC in the 90s

For counselor Nancy Wainer Cohen, this book is the sibling to Silent Knife: Cesarean Prevention and Vaginal Birth after Cesarean (Bergin & Garvey, 1983) her critically-acclaimed expose on America's growing reliance on cesarean sections. Open Season provides fresh insights and new information on the subject, offering guidance to childbearing couples, educators, health professionals, and scholars who value the natural path of childbirth.

Readers will find this book timely, informative, shocking, irreverent, and extremely readable. Cohen's intimate writing style presents a compendium of knowledge on childbirth in the fashion of a personal letter. Her aim is to lower America's alarming reliance on cesarean section, which is currently at 25 percent of all births, and to return the responsibility for childbirth to women by encouraging them to choose the kind of birthing experience they wish to have. In addition to cesarean section, Cohen discusses many other generally unnecessary interventions performed on women during pregnancy and childbirth--such as fetal monitoring and routinized hospital procedures.