What is the ideal way to give birth to your baby? Is it a high-tech delivery, with drugs, and monitors, and surgery? Or is it more naturally, with a midwife and/or birth center? Is it possible today to combine the best of twentieth-century medicine with the human advantages of a natural childbirth?

Penny Armstrong and Sheryl Feldman, authors of the acclaimed A Midwife's Story, explore the issues that influence the way women give birth: technology, psychology, culture, medications, history, and women's relationships with their mothers. They demonstrate, in a warm and convincing fashion, that most hospitals aren't designed to bring out the wisdom of the body at birth. And they reveal how to find a setting that will help make your child's birth a healthy and powerful experience. Informative, provocative, and based on the latest medical research as well as on Penny Armstrong's years of experience as a certified nurse-midwife, A Wise Birth is essential reading for mothers, fathers, and health-care professionals.