San Antonio College Library

Madam Bwa has never been trained, but she's delivered over 12,000 babies. She works on filthy floors and in crowded slums, while her mothers-to-be eat dirt to survive. From Ethiopia to Cambodia to Haiti, across the Third World life lies in fragile hands. In this beautiful doc the difficulties of childbirth are laid bare and the strategies to improve maternal health and mortality rates are explored with an affecting clarity. An intimate portrait of...

Denis Walsh shows how small maternity provision has had a profound clinical and organizational advantage over large scale hospital provision, including saving of time and money by reducing intervention rates.

Dozens of influential leaders have heard the pleas of mothers and children in developing countries. Raising their voices to inspire a movement to increase healthy pregnancies and lower death rates, Melinda Gates, Kay Warren, Bill Frist, Kimberly Williams Paisley, Michael W. Smith and more speak out about why people of faith must get involved in The Mother and Child Project: Raising Our Voices for Health and Hope. Almost 287,000 women die each year...

"In this rare, behind-the-scenes look at what goes on in hospitals across the country, a longtime medical insider and international authority on childbirth assesses the flawed American maternity care system, demonstrating how it fails to deliver safe, effective care for both mothers and babies. Written for mothers and fathers, obstetricians, nurses, midwives, scientists, insurance professionals, and anyone contemplating having a child, this book documents...

Afghanistan today has the second highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the world. Filmmaker Sedika Mojadidi reveals the extent of this tragedy by documenting the 2003 return to Afghanistan of her father, Dr. Qudrat Mojadidi (an OB/GYN who emigrated to the U.S. in 1972) as he attempts to rehabilitate Kabul's Rabia Balkhi Hospital with the promised support of the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services. The film focuses on Dr. Mojadidi's emergency...

This is the only book to present the evidence-based policies and procedures that medical and non-medical staff can use to develop Mother-Friendly Care in their facilities. The Mother-Friendly Childbirth Initiative (MFCI), developed by the Coalition for Improving Maternity Services (CIMS), is a wellness model designed to improve birth outcomes and substantially reduce costs. It is an evidence-based mother-, baby-, and family-friendly model that focuses...

This lively history of childbirth begins with colonial days, when childbirth was a social event, and moves on to the gradual medicalization of childbirth in America as doctors forced midwives out of business and to the home birth movement of the 1980s. Widely praised when it was first published in 1977, the book has now been expanded to bring the story up to date. In a new chapter and epilogue, Richard and Dorothy Wertz discuss the recent focus on...

This graduate-level nursing text and professional clinical reference is the first to comprehensively address the escalating crisis in U.S. maternal health our country experiences the highest maternal mortality among developed nations and provides strategies and roadmaps for improved outcomes. It challenges the current approach to ameliorating the maternal crisis, which embeds maternal care into child health.