Word: childbirth
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...child of Lange and Mikhail Baryshnikov, artistic director of American Ballet Theater. When he heard the news two weeks ago, Baryshnikov, who was in Buffalo with A.B.T., flew back to Manhattan to see his daughter. "She's beautiful," says Lange, 31, of Alexandra, who was delivered by natural childbirth. "I was enormously proud that she came into the world naturally. But then my baby is bright and alert. She made it easy." Lange seemed almost as pleased to talk about her other "first-born": the starmaking role she calls "the first real acting I've done...
Eight years after her marriage, Caroline is in obstetrical stirrups being delivered of their first child: "She wasn't supposed to roar, the natural childbirth teacher hadn't mentioned anything about that, she was supposed to breathe and push. But as long as no one seemed to take any notice she might as well keep on, it felt so satisfying and necessary... The sound reminded her of something she had heard long...
...Childbirth remains one of the most grotesque and transcendent of all natural functions, matched perhaps only by its necessary preliminary. Everything about the process is astonishing. Especially the baby. Science Writer K.C. Cole, despite her own and her husband's most diligent efforts to know exactly what was happening, was still surprised. As she writes, "There is a wide range of things, it seems, that nobody ever tells you about having a baby." Her book, aptly titled What Only a Mother Can Tell You About Having a Baby, tries to narrow that range...
...doctors are not exactly the heroes of this book. For all is not peaceful birthing rooms and tranquil, exultant deliveries, as older mothers once hoped. According to Cole, women who have placed their faith in the teachings of Fernand Lamaze, Frederick Leboyer, Elizabeth Bing and other advocates of natural childbirth will, almost automatically, find themselves in an adversary position when they enter the hospital. She writes: "The truth is that childbirth in America is getting more unnatural every day. A woman expecting her first baby today has a 25% chance of delivering by caesarean. Even a 'natural' birth...
...blues. The recipe for the depression, she says, is to create an unrealistic myth about motherhood, offer unfeeling medical care, and then set the new mother down in a social system that offers her little support for her new child and new role. Oakley, the mother of three, thinks childbirth is so oversold as woman's greatest achievement that women believe something is wrong with them if they have ambivalent feelings after giving birth. Says she: "The medical profession should see it not as a problem of individuals but of the structure...