The Family Journey

From Mothering.com…

Cast Your Vote Now : The Falsie Awards

While fact-checking her editorial “Is Breastfeeding In Trouble?” for Mothering’s September/October 2007 issue, Peggy O’Mara enlisted the aid of the leading media watchdog group, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). In helping to verify O’Mara’s suspicion that several websites initially appearing to promote breastfeeding are actually “stealth” mouthpieces for the formula industry, the CMD became informed—not only of the shrewd, dishonest and manipulative tactics of the International Formula Council, but of Mothering’s decades-long history of reporting on the topic.

Now, the CMD is honoring O’Mara and Mothering’s enduring investigative journalism by presenting the story in their fourth annual Falsies Awards. The awards seek to uncover and rank (via reader voting) the year’s worst cases of corporate forces and their efforts to misinform. Mothering’s coverage of the formula industry’s ongoing and myriad tactics to undermine breastfeeding is credited and highlighted in the Falsie entry “Impeding Breast Feeding.”

We are thrilled by this recognition from the CMD, and are affirmed that this vital topic—on which we have so diligently reported—is gaining traction.

Further, three of the other Falsies nominated address other topics Mothering has previously reported on: Merck’s HPV vaccine Gardasil; mercury in seafood and changing guidelines for its consumption by pregnant or nursing women and children; and transparency in scientific research.

Read all ten entries and vote by November 30th for the Falsie you find most egregious.

I am so glad that she has found blogging. I am not the only one to tell her she needs to write this stuff down for us. No nonsense information about birth here.

Please, if you are having a baby, do what she suggests. Read! Think! Do! Don’t just give up! Don’t just think about birth when you get there. You plan your route on your vacation, you plan your wedding, you even plan your career, please, take some time to prepare for the birth of your baby. It is time that you won’t regret spending.

Here is the link

Check it out-

Get Born
The emerging alternative voice of edgy, honest motherhood

get born magazine is a quarterly literary magazine by mothers, for mothers featuring
smart, witty, sometimes irreverent, often sarcastic, always authentic writing for mothers.

We celebrate the whole messy process of motherhood by giving real women in the real
trenches of motherhood a chance to speak, to write, to make their voices heard.

get born provides a non-judgmental forum for expression free from fear or pretense
because we believe sharing our stories in this sort of environment is the best soil in
which to grow as mothers and women.

The vision for get born was conceived by founders, Heather Janssen, a writer and
English teacher and mother of four, and Katie Cassis, an actor, writer and English
teacher and mother of two. Our desire is to provide fertile soil for women to share their
stories. Our writers and readers are women are not afraid of either telling or hearing
the truth, and respect other women’s right to hear and tell the same.

This link has been passed around many times, and I still love looking at this artist’s work.

She also has cesarean artwork. It’s great at depicting the raw emotions associated with an unwanted cesarean, so view with caution if you are working through birth grief.

Here’s a petition that was started to specifically protect the right to nurse in public. As we found out last summer, CO’s law is merely lip service.

Many situations arise during birth where NOT acting is more beneficial than doing something. Here’s one that’s easy to implement (Or un-implement!) and has life-changing results. The standard of clamping and cutting the umbilical cord immediately began so that moms and babies could be cared for separately. As we now know, babies and mothers both fare better when they are kept together. Only in very rare, extreme cases would a baby need to be separated from his or her mother to obtain the best care.

See canada.com, Journal of the American Medical Association, and Gentle Birth.

Lotus Birth is a movement which supports allowing the umbilical cord to remove itself and not cutting it at all.