Open Season

For counselor Nancy Wainer Cohen, this book is the sibling to Silent Knife: Cesarean Prevention and Vaginal Birth after Cesarean (Bergin & Garvey, 1983) her critically-acclaimed expose on America's growing reliance on cesarean sections. Open Season provides fresh insights and new information on the subject, offering guidance to childbearing couples, educators, health professionals, and scholars who value the natural path of childbirth.

Readers will find this book timely, informative, shocking, irreverent, and extremely readable. Cohen's intimate writing style presents a compendium of knowledge on childbirth in the fashion of a personal letter. Her aim is to lower America's alarming reliance on cesarean section, which is currently at 25 percent of all births, and to return the responsibility for childbirth to women by encouraging them to choose the kind of birthing experience they wish to have. In addition to cesarean section, Cohen discusses many other generally unnecessary interventions performed on women during pregnancy and childbirth--such as fetal monitoring and routinized hospital procedures.

NANCY WAINER COHEN founded CSEC, Inc., the first and largest cesarean prevention organization in the country, in 1973. Since 1972, she has counseled thousands of women in the areas of cesarean prevention and VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean--an acronym she coined). She continues individual counseling and also speaks throughout the country to pregnant women, childbirth educators, midwives, health professionals, and consumers. Ms. Wainer Cohen is the co-author of Silent Knife: Cesarean Prevention and Vaginal Birth After Cesarean (Bergin & Garvey, 1983).