Okay, I'm the kind of gal that likes to know everything possible about side a and side b and then choose which side I want to be on after deliberating about it for myself - that is, if I want to choose a side at all.
I got a few books on birthing from the library today and am really pissed off that I wasted my time with The Thinking Woman's Guide to a Better Birth. I'm so revolted by this book that I'm not even going to bother to include an Amazon link here.
I picked up the book because I didn't take a childbirth class and I wanted some information. You would think from reading the title that you'd be presented with unbiased (or at least balanced) information, right? Nope. What I got was a diatribe on why you should distrust the medical establishment.
Look, here's the deal. I do not plan for my birthing experience to be textbook. These situations are a la carte, and I plan to pick and choose which conveniences/procedures/tests/yada yada I want when I get to the hospital. If I don't want an I.V. because they make me itch, I'll say so.
I do NOT need some holier-than-thou woman trying to make me feel guilty for the fact that I'm going to be having this kid in a hospital and not in a birthing center.
Because I feel so strongly about this book, I went to Amazon to post my review, and guess what I noticed? Everyone with the same opinion as mine (that the book is NOT for the "thinking woman"), has their reviews rated as "not helpful." Then I also noticed that the people who praised the book as being "the only book you need to read!" (what a crock!) had very high "helpful" ratings. They also posted under the same log-in names again and again to rate the book highly (dumbasses). OF COURSE it's going to rate more highly and the people who read reviews like mine think I don't know what I'm talking about, or that I'm a "sheep." Feminists get epidurals, too.
I just love it when things like this become a frickin' political issue. It's like the pro-naturalists were told by someone (hmm, I wonder who?) to go through the reviews and mark down anything that was against the book. Almost every negative review is marked as not being helpful, even though the writers are eloquent and clearly state in non-accusatory terms why the book wasn't helpful for them.
Go check it out - it's a great laugh.
Posted by Tiffany at October 20, 2006 09:37 PM | TrackBack