From psychoprophylactic to orgasmic birth.

The assumptions on which educators based childbirth education principles were valid when psychoprophylactic birth became available. Yet, educators and health-care providers have changed their assumptions about birth as they have learned more from the midwifery model of care, how women want to give birth, and how capable the body is to give birth. Educators' teaching must now emphasize the synchrony of hormones that facilitates birth, the Sphincter Law, and the sharing of woman-to-woman stories throughout the generations if birth is to be set in its rightful place-in the hands of the mothers.

Duke Scholars

Author Barbara Hotelling School of Nursing