Book Review

Home Birth Bound Mending the Broken Weave Maggie Banks

Return to Home Birth Bound Also by Maggie Banks Book: Breech Birth Woman-Wise

This 243 page paperback book provides a tactile experience through the use of high quality paper and is is in an easy to read format. The book includes no index, which the author explains in her introduction is a deliberate attempt to encourage the reader to read the book in its entirety rather than picking out chapters. The concept of reading this book as a story is enhanced by the inclusion of the extensive reference list at the conclusion of the book rather than at the end of each chapter. this encourages the reader to quickly move on to see where the story goes next rather than putting it down. The book presents a small number of statistics using figures and tables in a manner which is easy to follow for the reader.

The book begins with a biographical account of how Maggie Banks came to home birthing and sets the scene for the need to explore the journey that birth in New Zealand has taken. The remainder of the first six chapters gives a historical account of the medicalisation of birth in New Zealand and how home birth was nearly lost as an option to women. It then moves onto how home birth midwives have supported women in reclaiming their right to birth safely at home and gives examples of ways in which this can occur by using actual birth stories as examples.

I would recommend this book to anyone who suspects that there is a better way to birth than the medicalised model that predominates in Australia today. It gives an insight into this knowledge that will give midwives and consumers alike the confidence to search each other out and in deed mend the broken weave.

Andrea Quanchi
Midwife