Deliver! A Concise Guide to Helping the Woman You Love Through Labor, is a concise, straight-talking field guide to labor support written expressly for men.
Overwhelmingly, moms-to-be would like their male partners to accompany them as they experience labor and birth. But too often men don’t know how best to help and have a hard time finding resources developed specifically for them.
- Dads: Deliver! tells you what you need to know, but it’s still a quick read
- Moms: if you’re looking for one thing you’d like your partner to read, Deliver! is it
Deliver! takes fathers-to-be through the various stages of labor and birth, clearly explaining what a woman is experiencing and – most importantly – suggesting the many ways in which they can help. Together, we believe, they can make a birth a wonderfully positive event that builds on – and strengthens – the love and trust that is at the heart their relationship.
Here’s what we say in our introduction:
Why we wrote Deliver!
Modern men are almost universally expected to attend the birth of their children. But too often they have no idea what to do during labor. Without a clear idea of their role, men often see someone they love in great distress and feel powerless to help. Meanwhile laboring women, unless they feel fully supported by everyone around them, risk slowing or even stalling their progress, which in turn risks increased – and otherwise unneeded – medical intervention. The consequences of a poorly supported birth can be long-lasting, even to the point of severely straining the relationship that brought the baby into the world.
But men and women can do the just opposite, of course. Together, they can help make a birth a wonderfully positive event that builds on – and strengthens – the love and trust that is at the heart of their relationship.
And yet while birth books for women abound, the resources available to men to explain exactly what they can do to help are few and unsatisfactory. Expectant mothers commonly complain to us that their partners don’t read the books they give them – because what’s available is too long, too sophomoric or simply not written with men in mind.
Finally, help is at hand. Deliver! A Concise Guide to Helping the Woman You Love Through Labor is a concise, straight-talking field guide to birth written expressly for men. We take fathers-to-be through the various stages of labor and birth, clearly explaining what a woman is experiencing and – most importantly – suggesting the many ways in which their partners can help.
Okay, it’s not just for men
We’ve addressed this book to men because in the vast majority of cases it is a man who will be accompanying the laboring mom in the delivery room. And most often that man is also the father of the baby.
But sisters can make wonderful birth partners, as can girlfriends (and guy friends) and even moms and grandmoms.
If you’re a female birth partner and reading this book, sorry for all the ‘he’s and ‘him’s – we hope you can get some good ideas from this, too. Certainly, there’s nothing that we suggest here that requires a Y chromosome to do it.
Deliver! Books 