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The delivery of high quality and equitable care for both mothers and newborns is complex and requires efforts across many sectors. The United States spends more on childbirth than any other country in the world, yet outcomes are worse than other high-resource countries, and even worse for Black and Native American women. There are a variety of factors that influence childbirth, including social determinants such as income, educational levels, access to care, financing, transportation, structural racism and geographic variability in birth settings. It is important to reevaluate the United States' approach to maternal and newborn care through the lens of these factors across multiple disciplines. Birth Settings in America: Outcomes, Quality, Access, and Choice reviews and evaluates maternal and newborn care in the United States, the epidemiology of social and clinical risks in pregnancy and childbirth, birth settings research, and access to and choice of birth settings.

This handbook is aimed at those who provide prenatal and postpartum care to low-risk women. Emphasizing hands-on care, the book includes coverage of history-taking, physical exams, laboratory tests, health education, how to conduct an initial and a return prenatal visit, and the postpartum period and family planning. Focus is placed on physical and psychosocial well-being and health promotion, and special features include healthy pregnancy questions for differentiating between common discomforts and potential complications. Key moments tables summarize essential information for key gestational ages and the book also includes history-taking forms.

An official publication of the Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses (AWHONN), Perinatal Nursing, Fourth Edition presents up-to-date information based on the most rigorous evidence and offers suggestions for best practices. This new edition of the authoritative, comprehensive text used by perinatal nurses worldwide features a wealth of new content to keep practice current. New chapters related to patient safety and the development of a highly reliable perinatal unit, inform nurses how to conduct team training and drills for obstetric emergencies, create checklists, and effectively handoff patients. It features expanded coverage of high-risk pregnancy, from bleeding in pregnancy to preterm labor and birth, diabetes, cardiac disease, pulmonary complications, multiple gestation, and maternal-fetal transport. An all-new chapter on obesity in pregnancy covers risks to the mother and fetus, care from preconception to postpartum, as well as bariatric surgery. An expanded chapter on newborn nutrition includes new sections on the infant feeding decision, benefits of breastfeeding, nutritional components, and preterm milk and lactation.

Based on an ethnography of postpartum consultations by independent midwives in Switzerland, this book produces unique insights into home-birth parents’ breastfeeding journey from the first hours after birth to weaning. Considered the "natural" continuity of childbirth without intervention, breastfeeding is a fundamental component of the holistic, continuous and individualised care independent midwives provide as they engage with parents in a shared construction of meaning around breastfeeding. This book offers new perspectives on the conceptualisation of breastfeeding as a shared process. Parents, in collaboration with their midwife and baby, are jointly constructing "negotiated breastfeeding". As the child grows and develops, questions arise regarding the management of risks, the construction of the lactating body and the body work required, and the perception of breastfeeding as a means of communication with the child, consistent with a "child-centred" approach to parenting. Fostering a reflection on the contrasts and similarities between the marginal model of holistic care and the dominant biomedical model, this book sheds light on issues of a broader scope: the relationship to health risks and health promotion, gender inequalities regarding parental roles and responsibilities, the concept of the child as a "project", and the consequential "intensification" of parenthood. The book also explores transversal themes by outlining how reproduction and parenting are undertaken in Switzerland, framed by the local cultural, political and economic context, including the gender system and resulting power relationships.