"Simply put, midwife Ina May Gaskin is the most important person in maternity care in North America, bar none."--Marsden Wagner, MD, MS, former director of Women's and Children's Health, World Health Organization

"There is no better guide to have at your side than the legendary Ina May!"--Harvey Karp, MD, author of "The Happiest Baby on the Block"

"Ina May Gaskin is an American treasure."--Naomi Wolf, author of "The Beauty Myth" and "Misconceptions"

Renowned for her practice's exemplary results and low intervention rates, Ina May Gaskin has gained international notoriety for promoting natural birth. She is a much-beloved leader of a movement that seeks to stop the hyper-medicalization of birth--which has lead to nearly a third of hospital births in America to be cesarean sections--and renew confidence in a woman's natural ability to birth.

Upbeat and informative, Gaskin asserts that the way in which women become mothers is a women's rights issue, and it is the act that perhaps most powerfully exhibits what it is to be instinctually human. "Birth Matters" is a spirited manifesta showing us how to trust women, value birth, and reconcile modern life with a process as old as our species.

Called "the midwife of modern midwifery" by Salon, Ina May Gaskin has practiced for nearly forty years at the internationally lauded Farm Midwifery Center. She is the only midwife for whom an obstetric maneuver has been named (Gaskin maneuver). She is the author of "Spiritual Midwifery," "Ina May's Guide to Childbirth," and "Ina May's Guide to Breastfeeding."