Sears, William, Martha Sears, and Linda Hughey Holt, Pregnancy Book, The; Penny Simkin, Janet Whalley, and Ann Keppler, Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn

I read two reference books during my pregnancy, The Pregnancy Book, by William Sears, Martha Sears, and Linda Hughey Holt, and Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn, by Penny Simkin, Janet Whalley, and Ann Keppler. Both were recommended by the ever-helpful Rivka, who saved me from browsing through the vast array of pregnancy books and, very likely, having a meltdown.

The Pregnancy Book is a month-by-month discussion of maternal emotional and physical changes, fetal development, and family concerns. Any chronological breakdown of pregnancy is going to be imprecise, and so occasionally I’d find that a later chapter addressed an issue I’d experienced (I went through phases when I was reluctant to read ahead). Overall I found its tone reassuringly matter-of-fact and helpful.

Since the Searses have another book specifically on birth (called, of course, The Birth Book), The Pregnancy Book has relatively little detail on labor and delivery. Since for various reasons we chose not to attend a childbirth class, and the library’s Lamaze DVD was approximately twenty years old and quite horrible, Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn was a great relief. It is considerably more medical than The Pregnancy Book, with much detail on medications, interventions, terminology, and so forth. I found the sections I’d read useful, and if I’d not superstitiously avoided the chapter on Cesarean sections, that would have been useful too.

A note on diversity: I hadn’t realized that all of the sketches in The Pregnancy Book portrayed people who were not obviously non-white, until I opened Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn and saw photographs of non-white people. I did think, while reading The Pregnancy Book, that occasionally it assumed a middle- or upper-class reader; if Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn had class biases, I didn’t notice them in the sections I read.