Barry Gifford, author of the critically-acclaimed Sailor and Lula series and the upcoming poetry volume Imagining Paradise, will be speaking at City Light Books in San Francisco on May 31st at 7pm.

City Light Books is located at:

261 Columbus Avenue

San Francisco, CA 94133-4586

(415) 362-8193

The Boston Public Library is hosting Brita Belli, author of The Autism Puzzle: Connecting the Dots Between Environmental Toxins and Rising Autism Rates in May.

The event will be on Tuesday, May 22 at 6 p.m. in the Boston Room of the Central Library, 700 Boylston Street. For more information, click here.

Slavoj Zizek and Boris Gunjevic, authors of the upcoming God in Pain, will be talking about their new book with Roy Eisenhardt on April 23 at 8pm at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater in San Francisco. The event is being run by City Arts & Lectures, and you can click here to learn more or buy tickets (cost is $22-$27).

The Palace of Fine Arts Theater is located at: 3301 Lyon Street San Francisco, CA 94123

Greg Sumner, author of the truly fantastic Unstuck in Time: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Novels, will be giving a discussion of his book at the Baldwin Public Library in the Rotary Tribute and Donor Rooms on April 11 at 7:00pm. Make sure to come and check out his analysis on how Vonnegut’s life affected his world-renowned ouevre!

Click here to learn more!

Baldwin Public Library is located at:

300 W Merrill Street

Birmingham, MI 48009

248.647.1700

Ken Roth, executive director of the Human Rights Watch, will be speaking at a breakfast event for World Report 2012 at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.

The event is on Tuesday, April 10 from 8-9:15am. For more information, visit the Carnegie Council’s website.

Anna Anthropy, author of Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, will be at the NYU Game Center on March 29.

Author of Rise of the Videogame Zinesters Anna Anthropy will be at Bluestockings on March 28 at 7 p.m.

Bluestockings is located at 172 Allen Street between Stanton and Rivington.

Hamas: From Resistance to Government author Paola Caridi is going to The Middle East Institute of Columbia University. Come see her there on March 22 at 12:30 p.m.

Ina May Gaskin, midwife and author of Birth Matters: A Midwife’s Manifesta, will discuss the state of modern childbirth practices with reporter and author Jennifer Block at 92nd St Y on Monday, March 19 at 8:15pm.

The event, sponsored by the 92 Y  will be held in Buttenweiser Hall on Lexington at 92 St.

Click here to learn more.

The event is on March 8 at 7 p.m.

Modern Times Bookstore is located at 2919 24th Street, San Francisco, CA 94110.

Gregory D. Sumner, author of Unstuck in Time, A Journey through Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Journals, will be speaking at the Carmel Clay Public Library at 10am on Friday, March 2.

The library is located at 55 4th Avenue S.E., Carmel, IN. Click here for more information.

The event is on February 16 at 7 p.m.

Modern Times Bookstore is located at 2919 24th Street, San Francisco, CA 94110.

Contributors from the soon-to-be-released anthology Voices of the Women’s Health Movement will be present at a panel at Barnard College on Wednesday, February 15 at 6:30pm.

The event, cosponsored by The Barnard Center for Research on Women, will be in the Sulzberger Parlor, 3rd Floor, Barnard Hall.

Panelists will include Laura Eldridge, Helen Lowery, Lauren Porsch, Leonore Tiefer, and Irene Xanthoudakis.

Click here to learn more.

You can read the article — in German or translated into English — on the Der Spiegel website.

It is not easy for me to write a few words about Howard Zinn, the great American activist and historian. He was a very close friend for 45 years. The families were very close too. His wife Roz, who died of cancer not long before, was also a marvellous person and close friend. Also sombre is the realisation that a whole generation seems to be disappearing, including several other old friends: Edward Said, Eqbal Ahmed and others, who were not only astute and productive scholars, but also dedicated and courageous militants, always on call when needed - which was constant. A combination that is essential if there is to be hope of decent survival.

Howard’s remarkable life and work are summarised best in his own words. His primary concern, he explained, was “the countless small actions of unknown people” that lie at the roots of “those great moments” that enter the historical record - a record that will be profoundly misleading, and seriously disempowering, if it is torn from these roots as it passes through the filters of doctrine and dogma. His life was always closely intertwined with his writings and innumerable talks and interviews. It was devoted, selflessly, to empowerment of the unknown people who brought about great moments. That was true when he was an industrial worker and labour activist, and from the days, 50 years ago, when he was teaching at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, a black college that was open mostly to the small black elite.

…. There are places where Howard’s life and work should have particular resonance. One, which should be much better known, is Turkey. I know of no other country where leading writers, artists, journalists, academics and other intellectuals have compiled such an impressive record of bravery and integrity in condemning crimes of the state, and going beyond to engage in civil disobedience to try to bring oppression and violence to an end, facing and sometimes enduring severe repression, and then returning to the task.

It is an honourable record, unique to my knowledge, a record of which the country should be proud. And one that should be a model for others, just as Howard Zinn’s life and work are an unforgettable model, sure to leave a permanent stamp on how history is understood and how a decent and honourable life should be lived.

Ina May Gaskin is sometimes referred to as the “midwife of modern midwifery” because of the role she’s played in the rebirth of that profession in the United States.

Midwives, who are trained to assist with pregnancy, labor, and postpartum care, were once common in this country, but the profession was virtually eliminated in the early twentieth century and replaced by obstetrics. When Gaskin began performing midwife duties in the early 1970s, only a handful of U.S. hospitals employed nurse-midwives as birth attendants. Today about 10 percent of births are attended by midwives — either certified nurse-midwives, who mainly work in hospitals and birth centers, or certified professional midwives, like Gaskin, who attend births in homes or birth centers.

Gaskin practices at the Farm Midwifery Center in southern Tennessee. The Farm, an intentional cooperative community, was established in 1971 by Ina May’s husband, Stephen Gaskin, who had come to fame in San Francisco in the late sixties through his weekly lectures on spirituality and social-justice issues, called “Monday Night Class.” In 1970 he went on the road for a lecture tour and allowed more than two hundred young people to accompany him in a caravan of school buses and trucks converted into campers. Nine births took place in the caravan, with Ina May acting as midwife — since she was, at thirty, older than most of them, and a mother. A Rhode Island obstetrician provided her and some of the other women with a seminar in emergency childbirth measures, an obstetrics handbook, and supplies. Once the lecture tour had ended, most of the group pooled their money to buy land in Tennessee and start the Farm.

Gaskin soon accepted the role as her vocation and, with her friend and midwife partner Pamela Hunt, began to study natural childbirth. They got their training on the job, with some help from mentor physicians who had experience assisting in home births for a large Old Order Amish community in the area. Meanwhile the Farm was reaching out to the rest of the world through its burgeoning aid organization Plenty. In 1976 an earthquake struck Guatemala, killing more than twenty thousand people and leaving a million more homeless. Plenty volunteers traveled there to help, and Ina May made contact with the local midwives. From them she learned a procedure for dealing with a birth complication known as “shoulder dystocia.” She brought this lifesaving knowledge back to the U.S., where it became known as the “Gaskin maneuver,” the first obstetrical maneuver to be named after a midwife. She believes that midwives in the developing world possess wisdom and practical skills worthy of being studied in more-affluent countries.

The Farm has undergone many changes in its forty-year history, but the midwifery center has been a mainstay, providing prenatal care, doula services (nonmedical assistance and support for women in labor), birthing facilities, in-hospital services, postpartum care, and health education for women. The Center is known for low rates of medical intervention, morbidity (illness or injury associated with pregnancy and childbirth), and mortality and has become a touchstone of how safe birth can be.

Gaskin is the author of four books on natural childbirth. Her most recent, Birth Matters: A Midwife’s Manifesta, focuses on the sharp rise in cesarean births, or c-sections, in the U.S. and the corresponding rise in the percentage of women who die from birth-related causes, referred to as the “maternal mortality rate.” To draw attention to the increase in maternal mortality over the last two dec­ades, Gaskin began the Safe Motherhood Quilt Project (www.rememberthemothers.org). Like the aids quilt, it’s a collection of hand-sewn memorials, in this case honoring women who have died of pregnancy-related causes during the past thirty years.

For twenty-two years Gaskin published a quarterly titled Birth Gazette. She was president of Midwives Alliance of North America from 1996 to 2002, and a former director at the World Health Organization called Gaskin the “most important person in maternity care in North America.” In 2011 she was a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the “alternative Nobel prize.” She travels widely to lecture on the Gaskin maneuver and other matters pertaining to childbirth. Her message, at home and abroad, is that the most important “technology” for a woman in labor is patience, kindness, and encouragement.

I traveled to the Farm on a hot day in mid-July and sat down with Gaskin at her dining-room table in the comfortable, book-cluttered house she shares with Stephen. Two filmmakers were there making a documentary about her, and they set up their cameras to film part of the interview. Stephen stood in the kitchen, tall and thin, with a long white ponytail and a bea­tific smile. “People ask me if it bothers me now that Ina May is more famous than I am,” he said as he handed me a glass of water. “I answer, No! I am happy she is keeping our light lit on the international board.”

After we’d talked for an hour, a thunderstorm broke, and we made a dash for our vehicles and drove down to the clinic. The documentarians filmed Gaskin as she talked with Kristina, a young woman who was due to deliver any day, and her husband, Seth. The walls were decorated with pictures of wise-eyed babies, and the atmosphere was one of cheerful anticipation.

MacEnulty: One of my friends told me that when he and his wife decided to have a home birth, he was roundly criticized by family members, who said he was being irresponsible and endangering the health of the baby.

Gaskin: There is an assumption that we humans are inferior to the other five thousand or so species of mammals in our ability to give birth to our young. I have always found it hard to accept this notion, probably because my father was a farmer for years. Those who are used to the birth ways of other mammals know that it is easy to cause complications during labor by disturbing the mother. If we put horses, goats, and cows through the restrictions and indignities that most laboring women in U.S. hospitals are routinely subjected to, the animals would surely have as many complications as we do. The astonishing thing to me is that we have come to believe that our human bodies are not as well designed for birth as other mammals’ are. Really it’s our brains that can pose problems: we alone among mammals have the ability to scare and confuse ourselves about birth.

MacEnulty: How did you become an advocate for midwives and natural childbirth? Weren’t you an English major?

Gaskin: Yes, and after I got my master’s degree, I joined the Peace Corps. But I was always interested in birth and birth stories. I had a horrific hospital birth — a mandatory and unnecessary forceps delivery — in the 1960s, and I knew there had to be a better way. Eventually I began hearing stories of natural birth, and they sounded beautiful and very different from the experience I’d had in the hospital. I set out to learn about it, and it became a calling.

MacEnulty: Your earlier books — Spiritual Midwifery, Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth, and Ina May’s Guide to Breastfeeding — could be characterized as how-to manuals, but your new book, Birth Matters, is subtitled A Midwife’s Manifesta. Why the urgency?

Gaskin: The urgency arises from the fact that we in the U.S. are in danger of destroying both obstetrics and midwifery in favor of all births being surgical operations. We know from the example of private hospitals in Brazil how far this trend can go — many of those hospitals have c-section rates that exceed 95 percent. It’s important to realize that Brazil has a relatively high maternal death rate — higher than ours. If we’re going to imitate any country’s maternity care, we should copy a country with better outcomes than ours.

My partners and I — and countless other midwives — know that, under the right circumstances, births can be safely handled with a minimum of c-sections. We have been able to attend some three thousand births, including breech [when the baby enters the birth canal buttocks first] and twin births, over the last forty years, and our c-section rate is 1.7 percent. There were only two c-sections in our first four hundred births. If these statistics are possible for us, they are possible for others. To accomplish this, we had to make sure that pregnant women had good nutrition and a healthy amount of exercise, and we needed to do everything we could to reduce the amount of fear surrounding birth by demystifying the process. All of these measures together have made the good outcomes at the Farm Midwifery Center possible.

MacEnulty: But aren’t there times when a c-section is the safest option for a woman — for example, a woman with small hips and a ten-pound baby?

Gaskin: Of course there are situations when a c-section is necessary. It may be that the baby gets into a poor position, or, rarely, the placenta might start to detach from the uterus before the baby is born or plant itself right over the cervix. The latter complication happens more often in women who have had previous c-sections.

But my partners and I have found that c-sections are very rarely necessary because of a mismatch in size between the woman and her baby. Having helped a number of women with what appear outwardly to be small hips give birth vaginally to ten-pound babies, I know that appearances can be deceiving. I have encountered fewer than ten cases out of three thousand in which the baby was actually too large to fit through the maternal pelvis. It happens most often with diabetic women, whose babies can sometimes weigh more than twelve pounds.

MacEnulty: What percentage of pregnant women currently give birth by c-section in the U.S.?

Gaskin: Approximately 34 percent. In many hospitals the rates of induction [starting labor through medical intervention] are in the range of 70 to 90 percent. Given the increasing maternal and neonatal death rates here, it’s imperative that we make efforts to reexamine these practices. We shouldn’t be routinely applying extreme technologies to birth without a good system for monitoring the effects.

The U.S. maternal death rate steadily decreased between 1936 and 1982. At that point it leveled off for a few years and then began rising. Women today actually face twice the chance that their mothers did of dying from pregnancy-related causes. We should be studying what’s behind this backward trend, especially since it is not happening in other developed countries. And, I must add, there simply aren’t enough planned home births — about twenty-eight thousand births per year out of a total of 4.2 million — to account for this unacceptable increase. Though home births increased 20 percent between 2004 and 2008, still less than 1 percent of all U.S. births are planned home births. But that doesn’t stop some in the medical profession from trying to use midwives as scapegoats for shortcomings in our country’s system.

Several studies have appeared in the U.S. obstetrical literature over the last thirty years that manipulate statistics to claim that home birth is dangerous for babies. Many well-designed studies from different countries, including ours, have shown the opposite results — that planned home births are quite safe for mothers and babies and manage to produce good outcomes with low rates of medical intervention or transfer to a hospital.

MacEnulty: Are there other potential reasons the U.S. maternal death rate is rising? Inadequate prenatal care? Obesity?

Gaskin: Amnesty International investigated whether lack of access to timely prenatal care played a significant part in the rising death rate and found a lot of evidence to confirm this. Assisted reproductive technologies have increased the number of multiple pregnancies, and it’s well documented that we have more diabetic women becoming pregnant than ever before. However, until we create a well-designed system for ascertaining the cause of every maternal death — something that most affluent countries did when they began providing health coverage for all their people — we’ll have to continue guessing how big a role obesity, assisted reproductive technol­ogies, medical errors, and older maternal age play in making childbirth more dangerous.

MacEnulty: Aren’t more and more hospitals making their birth environments more mother-friendly and encouraging the use of midwives and doulas?

Gaskin: There are some wonderful hospitals that are doing everything they can to implement mother-friendly care, but the pace of these changes overall is quite slow. We still have plenty of hospitals that have never hired midwives even though we know well that midwives on staff help reduce c-section rates. The website www.theunnecesarean.com publishes the c-section rates at a growing number of hospitals across the country, so you can seek out the lowest ones. Too many hospitals give more attention to the way their facilities look than to making sure their maternity-care practices are based on strong scientific evidence. We can’t expect hospitals to change if they are not pressured to do so.

MacEnulty: What part do lawsuits — or the threat of them — play in the rising c-section rate?

Gaskin: They play a very big part and have since the late 1980s. Many obstetricians will tell you that they’re doing a lot of c-sections because of fear of lawsuits.

The initial quadrupling, from 5 percent to 20 percent, of the c-section rate between 1970 and 1980 happened in part because insurance companies issued ultimatums to hospitals that they were no longer to do — or teach — vaginal breech births. In a 1979 report commissioned by the U.S. government, a researcher pointed out that almost none of the respondents to the survey had actually been sued. Still, insurance com­panies decided that vaginal breech births weren’t safe. If doctors performed them, the insurer would cancel the malpractice insurance for the whole hospital. And the obstetrics community did not fight that ultimatum as it should have.

The malpractice lawsuit was invented in the U.S. because of the large number of uninsured people. The idea was that if a medical error created an expensive lifelong disability for someone who was uninsured, there needed to be some way of financing the future healthcare of that person. Now the tail is wagging the dog.

MacEnulty: Why did the insurance companies insist on c-sections if lawsuits were not really an issue?

Gaskin: When you have people who are not trained in critically reading the medical literature, they often can’t distinguish between good research and bad research, and they’ll go with whatever sounds scariest. One very unbalanced article published in 1959 by Dr. R.C. Wright helped fuel fears about vaginal breech births. Apparently his breech-delivery skills weren’t up to par. His article was the first to recommend that all breech babies be extracted via cesarean. By 2001 it was rare for a breech baby to be born vaginally anywhere in the U.S.

MacEnulty: Before c-section became so commonplace, how were breech births handled?

Gaskin: Almost all were born vaginally. It used to be that every obstetrician and family doctor who did obstetrics was required to know how to deliver breech babies. During the first few years that I worked as a midwife, the doctors at our local hospital were proud of their breech skills. I remember hearing about a twelve-pound baby who’d been born breech in good condition. Most academically trained midwives in the U.S., however, were not taught to deliver breech babies until recently. It was assumed that they would work in hospitals, where there would always be a doctor available to step in. As a result, the midwives who did know how to deal with breech birth were those who had a home-birth practice or had learned the skill in some impoverished area of the world. And after 1980 or so doctors themselves were no longer trained in breech deliveries. This put many women with undiagnosed breeches in unsafe hands when they arrived at the maternity ward: if their babies came too quickly, there might not be time to prepare for a c-section, but that would be the only option available to the doctor.

MacEnulty: How did you learn how to deliver a breech baby?

Gaskin: During our early years here at the Farm we had a mentor named John O. Williams Jr. He was one of two family doctors who provided medical and maternity services to the Old Order Amish community nearby. For the Amish, home birth has always been the norm, and they are good at it. The grandmothers did a lot of the deliveries. But when something was out of the ordinary, they would get in touch with Dr. Williams. The first time he went there for a breech birth, he explained that they would have to go to the hospital. The two grandmothers said, “Our doctor in Ontario always does breech births at home. You’re as good as he is, aren’t you?” That turned out to be his first, but not his last, home breech delivery.

At the beginning, whenever a baby was in breech position at the Farm, we would take the woman to the hospital, but the doctors there always did these big episiotomies [incisions to the perineum], which we knew weren’t necessary. One time they put the woman under general anesthesia, and then they had difficulty getting the labor going again. We felt that if we’d been with the woman, she would have stayed relaxed, and general anesthesia wouldn’t have been necessary. Eventually we had one breech baby that came too fast for us to get the mother to the hospital, and the baby literally fell into the midwife’s hands.

Breech birth can be difficult but usually isn’t if everyone is able to remain calm. The danger with breech babies is that it’s tempting to grab their feet and pull while panicked (exactly the wrong thing to do). Dr. Williams came for the first planned breech birth we performed. It wasn’t long before I was doing them while he watched. He also used to come out for twins when he could. That was how we saw our first footling breech.

MacEnulty: “Footling”?

Gaskin: That’s when the baby comes out feet first. In this case involving twins, baby number one came out fine, but baby number two was taking longer than Dr. Williams was comfortable with, so he just held the baby’s feet and gently guided him out.

MacEnulty: What can happen when doctors don’t know how to do vaginal breech births?

Gaskin: Doctors can become so afraid of assisting in a vaginal breech delivery that they might perform a c-section in a situation that is not as safe as it should be. In extreme cases the mother can even die. In New South Wales, Australia, for instance, there were three maternal deaths in 2010 stemming from elective c-section for breech presentations, and a 2007 Dutch study reported four such deaths within a three-year period. I know of two other maternal deaths that happened in the U.S. because of the mandatory c-section policy for breech babies. One of these women was a physician herself. The other was the mother of nine children, a Jehovah’s Witness, whose second twin was a footling breech after the vaginal birth of her first. She refused a blood transfusion because of her faith and bled to death during a c-section that would not have been performed twenty or thirty years ago. Her doctor was more worried about delivering the easiest footling breech possible — a second full-term twin — than about doing a c-section for a mother whose religious principles didn’t allow her to receive blood.

It’s actually insane that our obstetricians aren’t properly trained to deal with a situation that occurs in about 4 percent of all pregnancies at term, especially when most of the training could be accomplished with the use of mannequins and baby dolls and videos of breech births.

MacEnulty: The Jehovah’s Witness case seems like a rare occurrence. When women die as a result of c-section, what typically goes wrong?

Gaskin: Pulmonary embolism is one of the most frequent fatal complications. A blood clot in the leg dislodges and travels to the lungs. It can happen days or even weeks after a c-section, and often women and their family members aren’t warned of the signs and symptoms of this complication when they are discharged from the hospital. Hemorrhage, infection, and placental complications in a subsequent pregnancy are three other possible causes of maternal death after a c-section.

A vaginal birth has always been safer for the mother. The risk of death of the mother is three times greater for c-section than for vaginal birth. If we’re talking about emergency c-section only, this figure rises to four times greater. It’s a shame that any woman should lose her life because certain obstetrical skills are no longer taught.

Read the complete text in the print edition of Sun Magazine’s issue 433.

Historical survey rather than a polemical view of the problematic Islamist movement that has both sounded the Palestinians’ needs and plagued Israel since the group’s founding in 1987.

In this capable, evenhanded work of research, proficiently translated from the Italian, journalist and historian Caridi carefully tracks the founding of Hamas from its offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood to its West-defining period of terrorism to its eventual, effectual embrace of political representation since 2006. With the de facto protectorate of Egypt over the Palestinian territories after Israel’s 1967 war, the Gaza Strip became the locus of the Islamic resistance movement that evolved from the Muslim Brotherhood, implementing social programs as well as political education in rebuilding the Palestinian identity. The First Intifada of 1987 ignited Hamas and prompted its fledgling leaders to the nettlesome Palestinian National Congress, calling for the elimination of Zionism, which has stuck in Israel’s craw ever since, proving nothing but an embarrassment to the movement. Caridi claims that the Charter’s “significance has in actual fact been overestimated,” and more or less supplanted by more conciliatory language once Hamas acquiesced to participate in elections in 2006, yet the anti-Israel phrasing was never revoked. Women make up a good half of its membership, although polygamy is accepted and the wearing of the hijab expected; terrorism in the form of suicide bombing was activated in retaliation for Baruch Goldstein’s shooting inside Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque in 1994, killing 29 Muslims; and the movement has stubbornly opposed the Oslo peace negotiations. Hamas’ relationship with Fatah (Yasser Arafat’s political organization) has been prickly, and its 2006 election victory has brought it to power as well as to grief.

Somewhat densely plotted, this is nonetheless an intriguing study of Hamas’ tortuous movement from “pebbles to power…from terrorist attacks to ministries.”

Editor Kick (Everything You Know Is Wrong) gives me the scoop: “My vision from the start was to essentially create The Norton Anthology of Literature in graphic form”—and he’s getting three volumes to play with. “Lyric poems and short stories are contained [in these volumes] in their entirety,” he continues. “But novels, plays, and epic poems are usually excerpted. Not always, though. Lysistrata, Medea, the Book of Revelation, and a handful of others contain the complete narrative, though they are condensed/abridged.” About 80 percent is new material; the rest reprints. Looks like a must-buy for all academic libraries, many public libraries, and many high schools, and an exciting new benchmark for comics! Expect volume 2 in July and volume 3 in October.

By Martha Cornog

The Graphic Canon, Volume 1: From Gilgamesh to Shakespeare to Dangerous Liaisons
Seven Stories Press
Apr. 2012. 448p. ed. by Russ Kick. pap. $29.95.
ISBN 9781609803766

Click here to read the full synopsis.

And click here to read Joel Berg’s recent op-ed in the Huffington Post on racism in the domestic policy regarding food stamps.

The Feministing Five: Ina May Gaskin

By Anna

As promised, this week’s Feministing Five is with the legendary Ina May Gaskin. Ina May is the famed “midwife of modern midwifery” and has revolutionized the way the world views this ancient practice since the emergence of her seminal book “Spiritual Midwifery.” This past month, Ina May was awarded the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize in Sweden called The Right Livelihood Award, which “honours and supports those offering practical and exemplary answers to the most urgent challenges facing us today.” And indeed, Ina May does. A pioneer in the natural birth movement, Ina May firmly places control back into women’s hands from what she calls “male-centered, misogynistic birthing processes” which views women’s bodies as defective designs and allows for profit to be made from women’s fears of their own bodies.

Born in 1940, Ina May was an English major who accidentally fell into midwifery. Her and her husband Stephen Gaskin (also winner of The Right Livelihood Award in 1980 and infamous teacher of the Monday Night Class in the 1960s) went on to establish The Farm, a 1,750-acre commune in Tennessee, with a population once at its highest of 1500 residents, where Ina May runs The Farm Midwifery Center. The cesarean rate at The Farm’s clinic is less than 2% and people from all over the world come to receive their home birth services.

Ina May has written several books, her most recent being “Birth Matters: A Midwife’s Manifesta.” She is the only midwife to have an obstetric maneuver named after her, called the Gaskin maneuver, which resolves shoulder dystocia during childbirth.

It was such an inspiration to interview Ina May. The passion that she has for her work is infectious. A staunch advocate for woman-centered childbirth processes, she is a firm believer in taking back the power to give birth when and how we choose. How much more feminist could that be?

And now, without further ado, the Feministing Five, with Ina May Gaskin. (And don’t forget to stay tuned next week for a special Part II of this interview!)

Anna Sterling: How has feminism impacted your midwifery work?

Ina May Gaskin: Feminism was very powerful to me when I got the phrase from Robin Morgan, “Sisterhood is powerful.” I was experiencing those three words as a new mother because I was realizing that isolated, I had no power. During my first birth, I was subjected to insane treatment– mandatory forceps delivery. I came into contact with women a year and a half later who were saying,”This is not going to happen to us again,” and stayed at home to give birth the next time. They persuaded a friend who was a labor and delivery nurse to act as a midwife. These women came out of this experience so powerful, happy with the birth and baby obviously healthy and doing well. Instead of being scared afterwords in her new role as a mother, she was powerful and you could feel it. That excited me.

Another three or four years later, I was lecturing at Yale and I thought people would be excited about the midwifery portion because the women in my village found it so empowering that we didn’t have misogynistic obstetricians that were so prevalent back then jamming forceps into us and pulling our babies out. Instead, we could give birth ourselves. I was booed off the stage and I thought what are these young women reading? This doesn’t feel like feminism to me. What could be more feminist than taking back the power to give birth on your own terms and saying, “No, I don’t want a male obstetrician who is really misguided into thinking my body is some sort of defective design brewing around my legs and yanking my baby out with instruments before I give him a chance to show him what I can do?” There was no choice then. I guess we started a revolution in birth because I wrote a book with the help of a lot of community members and it became the first big selling midwifery book in the country and has been credited with helping nurse midwifery get off the ground.

AS: Who is your favorite fictional heroine, and who are your heroines in real life?

IMG: Katarina Schrader was a Dutch 17^th century midwife who attended more than 3000 births before C-sections were done and had a lower maternal death rate than the U.S. did in 1936. This is amazing. There’s a complication and it’s pretty prevalent in the U.S. because it’s related to how high the C-section rate is. At that time, it was rare because there were no C-sections. It’s when the placenta plants itself over the cervix so when the baby is being born, the mother has a profuse hemorrhage and can lose her life quickly. The first time this midwife encountered this rare complication (now, not so rare) the mother and baby died. The second time, she thought it through and she was ready for it. She scooped the placenta out, she put her hand into the woman’s vagina, pushed up on the baby’s head, pushed her hand further up until she could reach the baby’s feet and gently pulled the baby up by its feet. She saved mother and baby seven times she encountered that. Today, women are still losing their lives due to this complication. That incident has gone up as a result of the high rates of C-sections.

Also, Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis. He was a young doctor, Hungarian by birth, in Vienna, Austria working in a time where you had two clinics. Poor women went to the doctor’s clinics and the women with more money went to the midwives clinic. The death rate at the midwives clinic was almost zero (speaking of mothers) and in some seasons, it was 50% at the doctor’s clinic. The reason these women were dying was because the doctors wouldn’t wash their hands. They were doing autopsies where they were learning anatomy on the bodies of dead women and then do a vaginal exam and a healthy young woman would die 3-5 days after giving birth. Semmelweis had the courage to open his mind and learn what might be causing this and he could prove that washing hands would save the lives of women, but he couldn’t convince the other doctors to do it. He died in an insane asylum. We’re kinda back there. That man was so heroic that he deeply inspired me. I also had to learn from him how not to go crazy knowing how to save lives without pissing people off or making them feel guilty that they can’t learn from you.I’m reading a book right now in German. I think that our distorted views of birth that we have here in North America stem from the European witch craze that took place between the mid 15^th century and 18^th century when midwives were the principal victims who were executed in a lot of different European countries—Germany, Italy, France, U.K. This story is about a young woman who was accused of being a witch. We’re now in a simmering witch hunt. I read the reviews that some had to say and they found it hard to believe that it would ever be that bad, but it was. It’s history. It’s fictionalized history, but it’s history.

AS: What recent news story made you want to scream?

IMG: That home birth isn’t safe. To suggest automatically that planned home birth isn’t safe is to accept a propaganda that’s being put out for more than a century in this country that is now sweeping the world because it’s a way of scaring people and a lot of money can be made from that. If you don’t have home birth as one of the choices women have then we can be exploited and birth can become a commodity the same way water is being grabbed and sold to people and the way food is being controlled by multinational corporations. For women to get it that we’re not inferior to squirrels, cows, rabbits and elephants, is a very radical thought that’s actually true. When you have about 5000 species of mammal and we’re encouraged to believe that we’re the only one that can’t give birth, that’s mis-designed? That takes quite a stretch but that’s the overall belief system our culture has taught us to adopt, and it’s not true. For someone like me and most of my partners who have not had formal medical education, how could we produce such good results? We had 186 babies from the beginning before we had a need for a C-section. Now 1 in 3 and in some places half the women are having C-sections? Who is benefiting from that?

AS: What, in your opinion, is the greatest challenge facing feminism today?

IMG: You have to put mothers into feminism. I think second wave feminism found the motherhood question so difficult that it shied away from it and so the only part of reproductive rights had to do with abortion rights. Yes, we have to have that but we also have to have choice in how we give birth, with whom, where and how. We shouldn’t have corporate entities like multinational insurance companies dictating how we give birth. Insurance dictates to hospitals and to doctors and doctors dictate to midwives and all of this dictates to women, “This is how you’re going to give birth. In essence, we own you. You don’t.”

AS: You’re going to a desert island, and you’re allowed to take one food, one drink and one feminist. What do you pick?

IMG: Water. I’d probably have something Japanese—sushi with miso. Elizabeth Cady Stanton rocked. She found it possible to imagine that you could be a powerful mom. She had help from Susan B. Anthony who would take care of her 7 kids while Elizabeth went into the attic and wrote powerful speeches. I love that kind of feminism where you had someone who didn’t have kids and someone who did team up and put their energies together. I think what those two women had was amazing and I think we need that kind of cooperation amongst feminists today.

From www.cclapcenter.com:

Drugs and depravity and a bunch of jaded, crazy, over-sexed American Peace Corps volunteers in Mongolia, told with sparse thrilling language and filled with riveting characters. A brilliant juxtaposition of old-timey Mongolia, with flashback snippets of marauding hordes overtaking everything in their path, and modern-day Mongolia — a devastated victim of Soviet rule and withdrawal, desperately trying to claw its way into the twentieth century.

Be One of the Five Thousand

by Dan Simon

Publishers Weekly

December 22, 2011

A few years ago there was a movement urging people to buy books as gifts. It was an important issue then, but not nearly as important as it is now.

Independent bookstores are experiencing a modest renaissance. Ten new stores have opened up in New York City alone. The older bookstores that have survived the retailing wars of the last thirty years have done so because the people working in them were resilient and became incredibly creative and knowledgeable. They are a generation of teachers now.

In recent weeks Amazon made available a price check app so its customers could browse store shelves and then purchase from Amazon. If I may make an immodest proposal, go to Amazon’s Search Inside the Book to browse, then go to your local bookstore to buy. The absurdity of a world with just one huge store isn’t a hard notion to grasp. None of us would want to inhabit such a world. Yet we take for granted the richness of our universe without thinking we have to do anything to keep it so. (It isn’t Amazon specifically that I’m against, it’s the idea of market dominance through extreme price cutting. Were it not for that aspect, I might be writing that Amazon adds tremendously to the quality of the marketplace for books.)

Publishers are hostage to the vagaries of the retail sector and the ongoing revolution in people’s habits relating to information and entertainment. Whichever parts of the retail sector are healthy benefit good publishing. But the unhealthy parts—a struggling economy and an ever-changing cascade of new business models and shifting reading habits—pose challenges. At this moment, just months after the demise of the nation’s second largest bookstore chain, the challenges have never been greater.

The threshold for empowerment is low. Publishers and our nation’s bookstores aren’t looking to sell millions of copies of most books. Typically, an independent publisher is looking to sell just 5,000 copies on average of even a great book. That means that every librarian, every bookseller, and each and every reader has an important voice in deciding what gets published and which books stay in print.

E-books are an interesting development. They add to the range of reading habits and lifestyles; they also add to the efficiency of what has always been a fabulously inefficient industry; and, yes, they reduce the size of the market for printed and bound books. But the big question isn’t about format, it’s about price. The strongest decision you can make right now as a reader is to not always go for the cheapest price you can find. Pay more to get more.

What are booksellers looking for? I think they’re looking for us to be forceful in our choices about where we buy. Studies show that dollars spent in the local economy save huge numbers of good jobs, whereas dollars spent at international chains kill jobs and hurt communities. Every time you buy local you’re doing something for your friends and neighbors as well as yourself.

Books aren’t going away. They continue to be the primary source for new ideas. They tell our history. And they point us in the direction of our future. So consider yourself reminded. Be one of the five thousand people who keep book culture alive. Read books, talk about them. Give them as gifts.

Dan Simon is the publisher of Seven Stories Press, which is based in New York City.

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2011/12/evolution-a-book-that-turns-science-into-art/

December 20, 2011

Evolution, A Book That Turns Science Into Art

A human riding a horse, photo by Patrick Gries (from “Evolution”)

Scientists have long used the skeletons of animals to study the relationships among different species. French naturalist Pierre Belon in 1555 included an engraving of a human skeleton beside a bird skeleton in his History of the Nature of Birds to emphasize similarities. Nearly 200 years later another French naturalist, George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, compared the skeletons of humans and horses. He wrote in 1753:

Take the skeleton of a man. Tilt the pelvis, shorten the femur, legs, and arms, elongate the feet and hands, fuse the phalanges, elongate the jaws while shortening the frontal bone, and finally elongate the spine, and the skeleton will cease to represent the remains of a man and will be the skeleton of a horse.

Charles Darwin also used skeletons of living species–along with live and taxidermied specimens and fossils–as he developed his theory of natural selection.

It would appear that skeletons, then, would be a great tool for teaching evolutionary theory. But I wasn’t expecting them to be so beautiful.

Evolution, by Jean-Baptiste de Panafieu, photographs by Patrick Gries

The first thing you notice when you see a copy of Evolution by Jean-Baptiste de Panafieu are the photographs. One of my magazine colleagues called these stark black-and-white images of animal skeletons, by Patrick Gries, “science porn.” An artist friend drooled over the beauty in the imagery. (You can see four examples from the book in our photo gallery.) It could be incredibly easy to own this book and never read the text.

But that would be a shame. The book, brilliantly translated by Linda Asher from the original French, is organized into 44 easy-to-read essays about various topics in evolution, from history to modern theory, each illustrated by a set of skeleton photographs. The co-evolution of predator and prey species, for example, includes images of a leopard skeleton attacking a screwhorn antelope, a golden eagle swooping down on a rabbit and a red fox pouncing on a common vole. The text is full of details and stories that will be new even to readers who are familiar with the topic of evolution. But everything is explained well enough that those who have not read much about evolution before will not be lost.

Evolution may seem familiar; in 2007, the book was released in large format and quickly sold out after a selection of its images ran in the science section of the New York Times. This new version is a much more shelf-friendly and reading-friendly size, and it includes a handful of new images. The book would make a great last-minute holiday gift for the science or art lover on your list or just a fine addition to your own library.

(I can hardly bring up the topic of evolution without mentioning Smithsonian magazine’s January issue, now online. With it, we created something called Evotourism–a new type of travel focused on evolution. We’ve started off with 12 destinations, from the Jurassic Coast of England to Australia’s Kangaroo Island. You can learn about evolution by digging for your own fossils, viewing some of the world’s weirdest species ever to evolve, even helping scientists study the co-evolution of a predator and its prey. And if you’ve got your own Evotourism suggestions, we want to hear them.)

Stieg Larsson’s other calling was as an anti-neo-Nazi crusader

By Naomi Pfefferman

Stieg Larsson, the Swedish author of the international best-selling “Millennium” series, including “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” died in 2004 at age 50 of a heart attack, before the publication of his crime thrillers made him one of the most famous writers of the decade. They have sold tens of millions of copies worldwide, already spawned three Swedish films and, on Dec. 21, fans will no doubt be lining up for the opening of Hollywood’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” directed by David Fincher and starring Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara, with a screenplay by the Oscar-winning “Schindler’s List” scribe Steven Zaillian. (The film opens in selected theaters on Dec. 20.)

But amid all this “Stieg industry,” as the late author’s life partner, Eva Gabrielsson, put it, a crucial element often has been overlooked: Just how much Larsson embedded in his novels a fundamental passion of his life — his crusade against neo-Nazism and violent far-right movements, which he viewed as anathema to Sweden and to all modern society.

“Those who see Stieg solely as an author of crime fiction have never truly known him,” Gabrielsson writes in her memoir, “There Are Things I Want You to Know About Stieg Larsson and Me” (released last June by Seven Stories,and due out in paperback on Jan. 10). The “Millennium” series, she said, “is only one episode in Steig’s journey through this world, and it certainly isn’t his life’s work.”

“The trilogy is an allegory of the individual’s eternal fight for justice and morality, the values for which Stieg Larsson fought until the day he died,” Marie-Francoise Colombani wrote in the foreword to Gabrielsson’s book.

An abiding part of Larsson’s mission was researching and exposing Sweden’s Nazi past (even though the country was officially neutral during World War II), and, more urgently, the resurgence of violent racist groups in Scandinavia in the 1980s and ’90s, during which time Larsson wrote for the anti-racist British magazine Searchlight and, in 1995, co-founded a Swedish equivalent, Expo. For those efforts, Larsson and Gabrielsson — an activist in her own right — received death threats and even bullets in the mail; their answering machine, set permanently on “record,” archived messages such as “You Jew f——- … traitor, we’ll tear you apart … and we know where you live.” In evidence collected after the murder of a trade unionist who had exposed a neo-Nazi secret, police discovered photos of Larsson and Gabrielsson.

“Stieg was absolutely the real deal — he was an expert on the neo-Nazi movement in Europe, and particularly in Scandinavia,” said Marilyn Mayo, co-director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. “We relied on his information in terms of tracking the movement in Europe — its growth, activism and various players. And we often shared information on the overlap between the neo-Nazi movement in Europe and the United States.”

Nazis and anti-Semites lurk throughout Larsson’s “Millennium” trilogy, which includes “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” “The Girl Who Played With Fire” and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.” “Tattoo” introduces the odd duo of Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist and co-founder of a magazine called Millennium, and Lisbeth Salander, a pierced, punk, antisocial computer hacker, who team up to solve a decades-old mystery involving the disappearance of a teenage girl.

Blomkvist was hired to find the now middle-age Harriet Vanger by her uncle, the industrialist Henrik Vanger, who reveals early on that his family has plenty of racist skeletons in the closet. One of them is Henrik’s brother, Richard, described in the book as “a fanatical nationalist and anti-Semite … [who] joined the Swedish National Socialist Freedom League, one of the first Nazi groups in Sweden.” Richard later joined the Swedish Fascist Battle Organization and there “got to know Per Engdahl [a leading Swedish far-right leader] and others who would be the disgrace of the nation,” Henrik said.

Spoiler alert: There’s also a serial killer whose targets turn out to have been Jewish women. In “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” the chief villain is not only a sex-trafficker but also a Jew-hater, who uses as his alias the name of a Swedish Nazi, Karl Axel Bodin — a real historical figure who, during World War II, traveled to occupied Norway to join the Waffen-SS.

Gabrielsson, an architect now in her 50s, was soft-spoken and straightforward during a phone interview, reached at the Stockholm apartment she once shared with Larsson. Because Gabrielsson was not legally married to the author at the time of his death, the “Millennium” property and profits went to Larsson’s father and brother. Since then, media outlets have extensively reported her battle with the Larssons over how his legacy should be presented and involving a fourth “Millennium” novel that the author reportedly was writing on his computer when he died.

Our conversation focused on how Larsson’s politics come through in his novels.

“What you see in the first ‘Millennium’ book is what a Nazi past does to a family, and to its family members: the kind of structures that are built up, based on who has the power,” she said. “What you especially see is how the women are affected. You can only survive in that family if you submit to your lower status and do what you are told. The only one who escapes that fate is [spoiler alert] Harriet Vanger. She flees and takes on a new identity.”

Similarly, Jewish children who were hidden during the Holocaust were forced to take on non-Jewish identities.

As Blomkvist and Salander investigate Harriet’s disappearance, they discover a mysterious list of names the teenager wrote down in her journal. When they figure out that the names refer to Jewish victims, they are on the path of a Nazi serial killer.

“It was a natural thing for Stieg to make them Jewish,” Gabrielsson said. “This is a killer who is acting for political reasons, within the Nazi ideology, so he is actually committing political murders. … The first book shows the effects of an ideology on a family and its women.”

In a way, she said, Larsson was commenting on current events: “It took all of the 1980s and ’90s until the Swedish police, prosecutors and politicians understood that the extreme right wing here were not criminals in the ‘normal’ sense, but were committing criminal acts because of a political ideology,” she said. “That’s why they attacked immigrants and made their bank robberies, to finance weapons and explosives, and why they killed police officers who tried to capture them. And that’s why Stieg made this parallel to the political agenda: He meant that these kinds of acts don’t just come out of being an evil person or a psychopath, but from a political point of view.”

In 1991, Larsson published a book, “Right Wing Extremism,” with Anna-Lena Lodenius, the first comprehensive work ever published on the subject, Gabrielsson said. He was already an expert on each group’s political affiliations, the members’ accomplices, milieus they frequented and how the then-flourishing white-power music industry financed extremist groups throughout the world.

One of the groups mentioned in the book was White Aryan Resistance: “Seven of its members had amassed a total of 20 convictions among them for crimes such as armed robbery, stealing weapons from military depots and homicide,” Gabrielsson said. The group’s magazine, Storm, published photos of Larsson and Lodenius, along with their addresses, Social Security numbers and phone numbers, and text that concluded of Larsson: “Never forget his words, his face and his address. Should he be allowed to continue his work — or should he be dealt with?”

Like his character of Lisbeth Salander, Larsson had to become an expert on personal security: “Stieg knew everything there was to know about tracking people, all the methods used by journalists, by the police … by extremists and criminal gangs,” Gabrielsson said.

Why did Larsson persevere with his work, despite the danger?

“I trace it back to something personal,” Gabrielsson said. Larsson’s beloved maternal grandfather, Severin, who had helped raise Stieg when the boy’s parents could not care for him, was an anti-Nazi activist who had been imprisoned in a little-known concentration camp in northern Sweden, set up to appease the Nazis. “The stories of these prisoners until recently have been wrapped up in a blanket of silence,” Gabrielsson said. “It wasn’t until five or six years ago that a film was made about these camps, and afterward researchers began to explore Sweden’s true past during the second world war. For Stieg, his work was the defense of the man who brought him up.”

Ironically, Larsson died on Nov. 9, 2004, the 66th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the date commonly considered the beginning of the Holocaust. “Stieg always commemorated this Night of Broken Glass by participating in public events,” Gabrielsson said.

His death was not only a shock to Gabrielsson, but to his fellow crusaders.

“In this house we still mourn and miss him,” Gerry Gable, the editor of Searchlight, wrote in an e-mail. After Larsson co-founded Expo, Gable participated in exchange visits to Sweden and joint investigations: “Over the years [Stieg] kept the flame alive at Expo; it stopped once but his drive brought it back. …  He was also my friend as is Eva, who has the same tenacity and courage as Stieg.”

“We were all shocked and saddened by Stieg’s death,” said Leonard Zeskind of The Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, author of “Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement From the Margins to the Mainstream,” who lives in Kansas City, Mo., and knew Larsson from the early 1980s until his death. Zeskind recalls visiting Larsson’s apartment and drinking coffee late into the night with the affable writer, who smoked cigarettes, expressed a wide range of interests, including crime fiction, was phenomenally bright and appeared to work 20 hours a day. “He once asked me to tell the [Jewish-American mystery novelist] Sara Paretsky that she should write a book about the Ku Klux Klan,” Zeskin recalled.

“There was so much grief when he died, because he was someone to us who felt like a brother.”

It is a great honor to have been chosen as the first midwife to receive the Right Livelihood Award. In accepting this award, I feel a deep sense of responsibility to my fellow midwives throughout the world.  Most of us necessarily share an awareness of powerful forces that now threaten the continued existence of the profession of midwifery in many parts of the world. Rates of cesarean section are rising rapidly in most countries, far beyond the upper limits recommended by the World Health Organization. As cesarean rates increase, rates of maternal death and serious injury rise as well, and women’s fears of birth increase. At the same time, timehonored knowledge and skills begin to vanish. I have visited private hospitals in Brazil where the cesarean rate was 95%, because women (and their doctors) had become so afraid of the normal process of birth that the cesarean became the default.When surgical and technological interventions in birth become the norm rather than the exception, the profession of midwifery loses its basis for existence, and obstetrics itself no longer encompasses the skills and knowledge that were once considered essential competencies of the profession. I’m speaking of the skills and knowledge necessary for assisting vaginal breech birth, the birth of a second twin, the ability to manually assess fetal weight, to distinguish between normal labor pain and pain that warns of complication, to determine the position of the baby in the womb, to change it when it is unfavorable, and even to accurately diagnose pregnancy. To explain what I mean by this last-mentioned skill, we in the U.S. have already come to the point of discovering several cases of false pregnancies diagnosed only after a woman’s abdomen was opened for a cesarean, an order of mistake that could hardly have been imagined two or three decades ago, when physicians’ education in manual skills was still considered important. The shrugging off of traditional knowledge in the U.S. had progressed to the point that by the 1990s, the two major obstetrics textbooks no longer included any reference to the phenomenon of false pregnancy (pseudocyesis), even though it has always been known to exist in humans, as well as other mammals. Only a country which has become superstitious in its use of technology could 2imagine that the use of imaging technologies could eliminate the need for teaching traditional manual diagnostic skills and all of the phenomena that occur in women’s reproductive lives.The history of birth in the U.S. during the 20th century illustrates well how essential a strong midwifery profession is if women are not to be held within a web of fear concerning their bodies’ supposed defects when it comes to giving birth. The elimination of the profession of midwifery in the U.S. in the early 20th century paved the way for a factory model of hospital-based maternity care that by the mid-century had two-thirds of all babies pulled from their mothers’ bodies with forceps. Such a radical overuse of forceps did not happen in countries in which the value of a strong midwifery profession was recognized. With no midwives present in hospitals to instruct medical students in the wise ways of nature, men with the least understanding of the conditions necessary for women to give birth in a humane way soon came to believe that birth was necessarily a brutal and bloody affair and that human females actually represented a serious failure on the part of nature - one that could only be remedied by routine use of technology and medication. Now the profit motive really began to emerge vis-à-vis birth, and fear, greed, and ignorance have combined to make a nasty brew, as well as a witch-hunt against midwives who work according to the rhythms of nature.The belief soon grew that babies would be most safely born when the mother’s body was intentionally injured in order to free the baby, with the further rationale that such an injury would prevent worse injuries that would otherwise occur. Such myths, unfortunately, are perpetuated through Hollywood films, which usually focus on birth complications for dramatic value, while physiological birth is not depicted because of taboos against showing the relevant portions of the female body.As one of the mothers who knew there was nothing wrong with my body and that the birth of my first child by forceps had been unnecessary - risky for me and my baby, with no discernible benefit, and psychologically harmful as well - I was left to find an escape route for myself for my next pregnancies. This dilemma prompted me to arrange for my own midwifery education (as I was unaware of that any other way was available), an arrangement that I was able to accomplish with the timely help of four physicians who also saw the need for midwives in our country. Free to learn from any sources I considered relevant, I learned from non-literate traditional midwives, from old books, and animals, as well as from kind physicians.3From the beginning of the Farm Midwifery Center, my colleagues and I placed women’s needs at the center of our policy-making and found that this way of organizing care yielded huge benefits for our babies as well as their mothers. We learned how to prevent complications by providing good antenatal  care and we developed practical methods for preventing unnecessary cesareans and inductions of labor.Looking around, I found some other midwifery services backed by supportive physicians in other parts of the world with outcomes that were nearly identical to ours. The midwives who worked with the late Dr. John Stevenson in south Australia, those who worked with Dr. Alfred Rockenschaub in Vienna between the mid-60s and the mid-80s, and those still working with Dr. Tadashi Yoshimura in Okazaki City, Japan, all reported cesarean rates well under 5% with good newborn outcomes  - just like ours. This was especially interesting, since we hadn’t previously been aware of each other’s existence. Unfortunately, in each case, these physicians - instead of being saluted by their peers - were treated as if they were hopelessly out of tune with the times and therefore irrelevant. We need to honor these men, who are still writing and teaching anyone willing to listen.Now that many industrialized countries are reporting cesarean rates of 30% or more, despite the fact that midwives have always been accepted members of maternity care staff, it’s important to recognize other factors that drive up rates of intervention in birth. Popular culture, the profit motive, fear, prudery, and ignorance all play a role and should be addressed.What is often missed is that excessive cesarean rates have other negative consequences than the loss of midwifery and obstetrical knowledge and skills. Simply put, as rates rise beyond 15-20%, more women die from complications such as pulmonary embolism, infection, hemorrhage, and a sharp increase in placental complications in subsequent pregnancies. None of the countries with the highest cesarean rates can report on low maternal death rates. This is especially true of the U.S., where women now face at least twice the chance of dying from pregnancy-related causes as their mothers did. In California, between 1996 and 2006, the maternal death rate tripled, with much of the increase being attributed to an excess of cesareans. Don’t expect the U.S. to report these telling facts with any accuracy, though, because the current lack of an infrastructure that requires and produces accurate and consistent reporting, and analysis of maternal deaths, means 4that the official maternal mortality figures represent possibly only a third to a half of the actual numbers.To avoid facing the problems that we are now experiencing in my country, I have some recommendations to propose:Countries with increasing cesarean rates should consider taking positive steps to reverse this trend, including stepped up efforts if rates rise about established limits. Midwives should be placed at the gateway to maternity care, instead of being introduced to women late in pregnancy and grudgingly if at all. This model of care recognizes that a woman’s confidence and ability to give birth, care for, and breastfeed her baby and the baby’s ability to feed effectively can be enhanced or diminished by every person who gives them care and by the birth environment. Because of this, all care given during the time surrounding birth should give the needs of the mother-baby pair precedence over the needs of caregivers, institutions, and the medical and insurance industries. Individual hospitals should consider implementing the 10 Steps to Optimal MotherBaby* Maternity Services (www.imbci.org).Midwives must have an important say in the formation of maternity care policy. Care should be individualized and founded upon consideration and respect for every woman. When not under threat of a dominant medical profession, which is itself dominated  by a powerful insurance industry or a powerful hospital industry, midwives can provide care that is organized around the principle that women’s and children’s rights are human rights and that access to humane and effective health care is a basic human right. Independent midwives must be able to make a living from their work, which means that insurance companies should not be permitted to charge such high premiums that it becomes impossible for them to make a living.We must wake up to the fact that it is easy to scare women about their bodies, especially in countries in which midwives have little or no power in policy-making, relative to physicians and the influence of large corporate entities. This takes no real talent. Given such imbalance, fear, ignorance, and greed begin to reinforce each other, and rates of unnecessary intervention soar, with women and the babies suffering the consequences. Birth care must not be profit-driven. This makes incentives to cause problems, not prevent them.5For this reason, there should be no more fee-for-service payment - for instance, financial reward for the unnecessary use of a vacuum extractor.If all countries put the welfare of mothers and babies at the center of maternity care policy, midwifery would have to grow strong again. In some countries, such as my own, it will be necessary to greatly increase the number of midwives as just one of  the ways to prevent complications and to reduce rates of medical intervention in birth. We’ll need lots of doulas as we make this transition. Midwives need to have a say in the major issues surrounding birth. In countries where they currently work under the intense domination of obstetricians, the work will be to bring the relationship back to one of balance. Midwives cannot allow obstetricians to bully them, because doing so is almost certain to mean that laboring women will be the next ones to be bullied.Attempts to make home birth illegal in any country will only distract from the real problems and exacerbate them, since planned home birth for healthy women provides a necessary safety valve for women who want a wider range of choice than their hospital might offer and a learning opportunity for midwives to learn about women in their natural state. Home birth midwives must be able to make a living from their work, and insurance companies should not be permitted to keep home birth midwives from being compensated for their work. Home birth midwives are being persecuted in almost every country, even in The Netherlands, where home birth services have a long and honorable tradition. I believe the development of a country can be measured by the degree to which  it respects the right of a birthing mother to receive a woman centered birthing experience, whether the birth occurs in a home or hospital setting. In this regard the current situation in Hungary greatly disturbs me. There, the failure to fully provide and  protect this important right is highlighted by the prolonged discrimination and mistreatment of the independent midwife Dr. Agnes Gereb. Agnes has spent more than 20 years trying to defend the fundamental rights of mother and child and in doing this she has been imprisoned, recently received a further 2-year prison sentence and has been held under house arrest for the past year. I now ask the Hungarian government to intervene to stop the abuse and unjust treatment of this internationally respected homebirth expert.Birth shouldn’t be thought of as money-making commodity or condition in which large institutions or governments control and dictate how women will give birth, ignoring individual 6mother’s wishes and needs. Inevitably, this too often puts bullies in charge of women’s bodies, something no other mammalian species allows. Some countries have midwives who are totally subordinate to physicians. In these countries, it’s typical for very harsh methods of birth care to be applied, and outcomes show this. It’s time to stop this sort of behavior. Traditional peoples, indigenous people don’t permit such behavior. We need to learn from them.

The Zinn Education Project seeks to promote the use of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States in classrooms in order to provide an alternative approach to history classes. Zinn’s books allow for a more complex and encompassing view of US history, particularly by focusing on workers, women, people of color, and social movements. Click here to learn more about the project!

Also, for you Spanish-speakers out there, make sure to pick up a copy of La otra historia de los Estados Unidos when it hits shelves December 13th!

Gregory Sumner will be speaking about his new book Unstuck in Time: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Novels at the Rochester Hills Public Library on Wednesday, December 7th from 7-8:30pm.

Link to the event can be found here.

RHPL is located at:

500 Olde Towne

Rochester, MI 48307

248-656-2900

Evolution: The Natural History of Animal Skeletons, Stripped Down

By Michelle Legro

What a flamingo, a capybara, and a guinea pig have to do with the beginnings of recorded time.

When Gunther von Hagens put together his traveling display of half-stripped bodies playing sports, chess, fencing, riding a similarly half-stripped horse, and generally acting like their human counterparts, audiences were horrified and fascinated.Bodyworlds was gross anatomy on parade, and to some it might have felt more like body snatching than an education in muscle mass and movement. But Von Hagens, for all his showmanship, emphasized that these bodies, preserved hopefully forever, were for learning. The entertainment was incidental.

The image that opens the Patrick Gries and Jean-Baptiste de Panafieu’s stunning book Evolution takes Von Hagens horse and rider and strips it completely, bone against black in a beautiful high-resolution photograph. The result is somehow even more animated, more eternal, and the quote paired with it, from the eighteenth-century naturalist Comte de Buffon, reveals the project at hand:

Take the skeleton of a man. Tilt the pelvis, shorten the femurs, legs, and arms, elongate the feet and hands, fuse the phalanges, elongate the jaws while shortening the frontal bone, and finally elongate the spine, and the skeleton will cease to represent the remains of a man and will be the skeleton of a horse…”

For hundreds of years, natural history museums have offered body worlds of their very own, skeletons stripped down for study, sometimes posed in their natural habitats looking about as natural as a pork chop in the jungle.

Evolution, published originally as a large-scale coffee table book in 2007, now in a physically smaller but expanded edition, provides a stark contrast of black and white and bone. Patrick Gries’ photographs against black backgrounds transform animal skeletons into tender and lively creatures, as animated in death as they were in life, while Jean-Baptiste de Panafieu, a professor of natural science, provides a concise summary of each animal’s place in the evolutionary ladder.

The book is organized according to the principles of, you guessed it, evolution, but de Panafieu prefers to tell the smaller stories of the parts rather than the whole: of predator and prey, of teeth and digits, of specific changes in fish, of brains and their carrying-cases, skulls.

Mostly taken from the Museum of Natural History in Paris, the animals represented here are from all over the globe, land and sea, big and small: the flamingo, the guinea pig, the okapi, the capybara, the house mouse, the little owl, stunningly-ribbed snakes, sea sponges, the nurse shark, seahorses, the pilot whale, the common carp. the sacred ibis, Humbolt’s wooly monkey, and of course, the human.

A rare book that is both a complete work of art and a complete work of science,Evolution dismantles the natural history museum into its parts, revealing a stripped-down animal kingdom and the commonalities at its core.

San Francisco friends, it will be your only chance to get a signed copy of Unstuck in Time, so mark your calendars now!

Book Passage is located at:

Come to the event to stock up on holiday gifts for those Kurt Vonnegut lovers in your life!

Elliot Bay is located at:

By Michelle Wallin

With the second man on the moon as his idol, thirty-something Mattias rarely seeks out the attention of the limelight. Preferring to live in the shadows, the humble narrator reveres Buzz Aldrin for his contributions to the Apollo 11 mission while allowing Neil Armstrong to revel in the glory. Wanting to do good in the world without everyone knowing, Mattias lives a quiet life in Stavenger, Norway as a florist for a small, financially struggling nursery, until life changes knock him out of orbit.

Johan Harstad’s first novel to be translated into English, Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You In All the Confusion? is an exquisitely crafted journey into one man’s psyche. Ignoring the disintegrating relationship with his girlfriend Helle, the looming bankruptcy of the nursery where he works, and his growing desire to slip away unnoticed, Mattias lives in denial, refusing to see that hiding from the world doesn’t save one from inevitable change.

When Helle suddenly breaks off the relationship and the nursery closes, an opportunity to vacation in the Faroe Islands arises. Unfortunately, Mattias finds himself early in the trip on a deserted road with soaking wet clothes, a sore and bloody hand, a wallet full of cash, and no idea where he is or recollection of how he got there. A kindly man discovers the forlorn narrator lying on a bus bench and invites Mattias to stay at his halfway house, a place designed for people suffering from mental illnesses who aren’t capable of living independently but who don’t need to be institutionalized. Accepting the offer, Mattias finds a home on the Faroe Islands with a cast full of quirky characters: a girl who rides buses to get random men to fall in love with her; a psychologist who hoards the health records of patients; a scarred photographer who swears never to capture another Kodak moment.

With Mattias as his springboard, Harstad writes about mental illness without invoking the normal slew of stigmas. Mattias’s straightforward narration about heartbreak, discontent, and unhappiness are emotional but Harstad’s writing is far from sentimental. Rather than hide his despondency from loved ones and readers, we see a fresh look at a troubled man trying to make sense of his life and his place in it. Although the novel is pretty much a one-man show, the secondary characters have backgrounds that are eccentric enough to give the dramatic tone of the novel a comedic edge.

While rambling at times, Harstad’s novel ultimately provides a thought provoking and insightful look at an individual, one with reactions and feelings to which readers are likely to relate. Mattias unravels his thoughts and allows us to understand his journey so that we, too, can comprehend what happened in the midst of his confusion, and perhaps put words to some of our own.

Nicola’s Books is located at:

Westgate Shopping Center

2513 Jackson Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI  48103

734.662.0600

Click here to read about the event on Nicola’s website!

Chronicles of Vonnegut

Two new books delve into the life and work of a man who couldn’t silence his political conscience.

By Steve Weinberg

Well, you’re in luck! He’ll be having a second event for his new book Unstuck in Time: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Novels, but this time at the Barnes and Noble on the Upper West Side. The event will take place at 7pm on Tuesday, November 22nd.

This particular Barnes and Noble is located at:

– Dan Simon

Celine Curiol is the author of three novels, including “Voice Over” (Seven Stories Press, 2008), which novelist Paul Auster has praised as “one of the most original and brilliantly executed works of contemporary fiction.”

Arshid Azarine is the leader of the Paris-based “multi-kulti” jazz band Azarine 6. He is currently working on his first solo album, “Raha”, which means free in Persian.

Barbes is located at 376 9th St. (corner of 6th Ave.) Park Slope, Brooklyn. Telephone: 347 422 0248

http://barbesbrooklyn.com/calendar.html

Gregory Sumner will be in the City of Brotherly Love on Tuesday, November 15th to promote his new book Unstuck in Time: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Novels. The event will take place at Moonstone Arts Center at 7pm.

Moonstone Arts Center is located at:

The event will be held:

Great Hall, Coffman Memorial Union

University of Minnesota

300 Washington Ave. S.E.

Minneapolis, MN 55455

Questions can be answered at birthmattersminnesota@gmail.com

From the event website:

Called “the midwife of modern midwifery” by Salon,  Ina May Gaskin, MA, CPM, will be in the Twin Cities speaking on her new book, Birth Matters: A Midwife’s Manifesta, a spirited manifesta that demonstrates why birth matters to us ALL, and how to trust women, value birth, and reconcile modern life with a process as old as our species.

If you are a midwife, a labor & delivery nurse, a doula, a physician, a health sciences student, a parent, or anyone who cares about the health and empowerment of women and families, you will not want to miss the chance to meet Ina May!

A woman who gives birth in the U.S. today is more likely to die in childbirth than her mother was. With one in three babies born via cesarean, the U.S. ranks behind 33 other nations in neonatal mortality rates and 40 other nations in maternal mortality rates.

As Kirkus writes Buzz Aldrin “The austere landscape and people of the Faeroes become players in Harstad’s poetic narrative, half-dramatic and half-comic, which takes on memorable turns with every page as Mattias realizes just how not in control of his destiny he really is.”

Read the full review here.

Gregory Sumner will be speaking and signing books at BookCourt in Brooklyn to promote his new book Unstuck in Time: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Novels. The event will take place at 7pm on Monday, November 14th.

BookCourt is located at:

There will be an event celebrating the release of Gregory Sumner’s new book Unstuck in Time: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Work on Friday, November 11th at 5pm.

The book release event is free and open to the public.

Greg Sumner will also be part of a panel discussion as part of Vonnegut’s birthday celebration at the Frank and Katrina Basile Theater at 7:30pm “Vonnegut on the Body: A Spirit and Place Festival Event” on Friday, November 11th.

For tickets and more info: http://kvml.eventbrite.com/?ref=etckt

Unstuck in Time is a portrait of the quintessential American writer as seen through the lens of his most important work. In Unstuck in Time (Seven Stories Press, November 11, 2011), Gregory Sumner guides us through Kurt Vonnegut’s best known works, fromPlayer Piano (1952) to Timequake (1997) and including an epilogue on his last book, A Man Without a Country (2005), to illustrate the writer’s profound engagement with the American Dream in its various forms.

Kurt Vonnegut was an active and critical citizen, a lover of his country even as he railed against its shortcomings and anguished over its failed promises. His books, written under dramatically changing personal circumstances and against the backdrop of seismic shifts in our country’s history, read together as a kind of diary, the entries of which Sumner here lays out with great passion and insight.

Greg Sumner has been a professor of history at University of Detroit Mercy since 1993. He holds a doctorate in American history from Indiana University and is the author ofDwight Macdonald and the Politics Circle.

Gregory Sumner, professor of history at University of Detroit Mercy, will be speaking about his new book Unstuck in Time: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Work at the Barnes & Noble in Royal Oak on Thursday, November 10th at 7pm. This event is the day before Kurt Vonnegut’s birthday and the book’s official release.

This event is free and open to the public.

This is event is located at:

500 South Main Street
Royal Oak, MI 48067
(248) 336-9490

Unstuck in Time is a portrait of the quintessential American writer as seen through the lens of his most important work. In Unstuck in Time (Seven Stories Press, November 11, 2011), Gregory Sumner guides us through Kurt Vonnegut’s best known works, fromPlayer Piano (1952) to Timequake (1997) and including an epilogue on his last book, A Man Without a Country (2005), to illustrate the writer’s profound engagement with the American Dream in its various forms.

Kurt Vonnegut was an active and critical citizen, a lover of his country even as he railed against its shortcomings and anguished over its failed promises. His books, written under dramatically changing personal circumstances and against the backdrop of seismic shifts in our country’s history, read together as a kind of diary, the entries of which Sumner here lays out with great passion and insight.

Greg Sumner has been a professor of history at University of Detroit Mercy since 1993. He holds a doctorate in American history from Indiana University and is the author ofDwight Macdonald and the Politics Circle.

From Shelf Awareness:

This week also sees the release of Unstuck in Time: A Journey Through Vonnegut’s Life and Novels by Gregory D. Sumner, who is a historian specializing in American studies. Sumner takes 15 of Vonnegut’s novels and traces both the author’s personal history and his personal philosophy through them, showing that these unique works were the result of one man’s refusal to take the received wisdom of “bigger is better” and “winners trump losers” to heart.

How Private Companies are Transforming the Global Public Health Agenda

A New Era for the World Health Organization

By Sonia Shah

During the 1970s and 1980s, the World Health Organization and other global health leaders often strove to improve the health of the world’s poor by targeting private sector excesses. They imposed restrictions, codes, and “ethical criteria” on the marketing of infant formula, pesticides, and tobacco, unnerving executives and stifling business plans. Success hinged on the cooperation of local governments, but where policymakers implemented recommendations they achieved real results. Breastfeeding rates rose, pesticide poisonings fell, and tobacco consumption declined.

Since then, the global health establishment has been turned on its head. Over the last two decades, the private sector has emerged as the world’s top source of financing and leadership in the fight against deadly disease. The resources of some of the private industry players involved in global health today dwarf those of the WHO. Groups such as the Global Business Coalition aim to turn “business assets into disease-fighting assets”; the GBC boasts a membership of nearly 200 companies, including multinationals such as Coca-Cola, Exxon Mobil, and Pfizer. Why the interest? Firms are responding to local demands for corporate social responsibility, but they also have come to realize, as they look to emerging markets for future growth, that underwriting public health is a long-term investment. As development economist Daniel Altman recently explained, in a global economy, “these people are your consumers, your workers, your investors.” Several former WHO officials now work on public health issues for private industry. Most telling is the fact that voluntary contributions from private interests and others now bankroll four out of every five dollars of the WHO’s budget.

The problem is that the companies most active in global health projects today hail from a narrow range of industries, many of which are under fire for their negative impact on public health. These private firms are playing a double game: disrupting local communities with one hand and writing big checks to ostensibly help them with the other. Often, their core financial interests are directly at odds with the business of improving the health of the poor, in ways that are distorting the global health agenda.

The extractive industry is a prime example. The mining industry, which includes oil and gas firms, has been at the forefront of many prominent global health projects. This year, the GBC handed out awards to six companies for their achievements. Mining multinational Rio Tinto was lauded for its anti-malaria work in Equatorial Guinea. The mining giant Gold Fields Limited was praised for HIV prevention efforts in Ghana. Anglo American has been widely praised in global health circles for providing free antiretroviral therapy to its HIV positive workers in Africa; its former chairman co-chairs the GBC. And ExxonMobil now contributes more money to fight malaria than any company outside the pharmaceutical industry.

But by its nature the mining industry’s core business of extracting natural resources is a disruptive process. Accordingly, these firms come to work on public health with blemishes on their reputations. Rio Tinto boasts successes against malaria in Equatorial Guinea, but in Papua New Guinea, the company dumped billions of tons of toxic wastes and was complicit in repressive violence that led to over 10,000 deaths, according to aclass-action suit filed in 2000. Gold Fields has reduced sexually transmitted infections by its mineworkers in Ghana by 90 percent since 2004, but local NGOs and independent experts report that its operations there have contaminated waterways with dangerously high concentrations of heavy metals, depriving local villages of drinking and irrigation water. Anglo American plays a leadership role in global health circles, but a former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has called the company’s exploitation of land and water around mines in Ghana a “violation of communities’ right to maintain a sustainable livelihood.”

These examples speak to more widespread environmental disruptions committed across the mining industry: in Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger delta, for instance, oil companies — including ExxonMobil — contaminated local waterways and fishing grounds with more than 2.4 million barrels of spilled oil between 1976 and 1996, according to Nigerian government analyses. After the oil companies launched community development programs to stanch criticism, the anti-poverty charity Christian Aid called the Niger delta a “veritable graveyard of [such] projects, including water systems that do not work, health centers that have never opened and schools where no lesson has ever been taught.”

Soft-drink and snack companies have also moved to the forefront of key global health initiatives, in particular the fight against non-communicable diseases. NCDs, which include afflictions such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes, now cause more than half of all deaths in poor and middle-income counties. They have vaulted to the top of the global health agenda — the UN made them a signature issue during this year’s General Assembly. Through an association called the International Food and Beverage Alliance, the world’s largest processed food and drink companies — including Nestle, PepsiCo, Kraft, and others — actively participated in negotiations leading up to the summit in September, sitting in on ministerial meetings and chairing working groups.⁠ The director of global health policy at PepsiCo, Derek Yach, helped shape industry’s prominent role. Yach was a UN official — executive director of non-communicable diseases at the WHO — before he moved to the private sector in 2007.

Here fundamental business interests collide with global health concerns, too. Soft-drink and snack companies make a living by reducing whole foods into easy-to-manufacture processed ones — the kinds of foods that increase the risk of developing NCDs. To maintain their financial health, these firms need to sell more of their products in the very countries where NCD deaths are rising. With sales in developed countries flat, the industry now relies on increasing revenues in emerging markets to sustain future growth. Between 1982 and 2000, U.S. companies quadrupled their investments in overseas food processing companies, and sales of processed foods overseas grew from $39.2 billion to $150 billion.⁠ The average Mexican now consumes nearly 30 gallons of Coca-Cola drinks every year, more than the average American. Rates of NCDs have risen accordingly.⁠

The industry most involved in global health initiatives is undoubtedly the drug industry. Novartis donates drugs to the WHO to fight leprosy and develops new vaccines for dengue and tuberculosis. Merck and Pfizer have made important drug donations to tackle diseases such as onchocerciasis and trachoma. But big pharma is in a similarly complicated position. The most effective global health interventions undermine their core business, which is selling brand-name drugs at premium prices. That’s why Novartis is currently attempting to weaken India’s patent laws in ways that the aid group Médecins Sans Frontières says will have a “devastating impact” on the poor’s access to medicine. In 1998, 39 top drug companies sued the South African government for implementing a law designed to make antiretroviral drugs more accessible to poor people dying of AIDS.

It’s not that the WHO and other public sector leaders fail to recognize their new partners’ conflicts. The fact is they have nowhere else to turn. In 1950, the WHO’s budget derived from assessed dues on member nations. Over the past few decades, that financing stream has run dry. In reaction to the perceived politicization of UN organizations such as UNESCO and the WHO, major UN donors introduced a policy of zero real growth to the UN system’s budgets in 1980 and of zero nominal growth in 1993.

Starved of public financing, the WHO has had to rely upon voluntary contributions from donor countries, private philanthropies, companies, and NGOs. Unlike funds from assessed dues, individual donors can earmark “extrabudgetary” monies for whatever specific purpose they like, thus circumventing WHO control. In 1970, these private contributions constituted a quarter of the agency’s budget. By 2008, they constituted nearly 80 percent. Thus it is now the private donors, not the WHO, who can call the shots in Geneva, and thereby shape the global health agenda.

Their influence is clear. The WHO allocates its regular budget to the diseases that account for the most mortality around the world. Extrabudgetary funds, in contrast, support different interests. According to an analysis of the agency’s 2004-05 budget, 91 percent of the WHO’s extrabudgetary funds were earmarked for diseases that account for just 8 percent of global mortality. Given the dominance of extrabudgetary funds in the WHO’s overall expenditures, the WHO ended up spending 60 percent of its funds on illnesses that account for just 11 percent of global mortality. A substantial portion went toward developing vaccines for infectious diseases, which are in line with private industry’s general preference for expensive, high-tech research over cheap, low-tech prevention. It’s hard to see how such a misalignment between the needs of the world’s sick and the distribution of WHO’s funds helps the agency meet its core mission.

This is not to say that the world’s poorest and sickest do not need the attention of the mining industry and fast-food makers. Voluntary commitments from food processing companies have taken hundreds of thousands of tons of sugar, salt, and fat out of popular products. Since 2004, Nestle has reduced the amount salt in its products by more than 6,800 tons, and sugar by more than 290,000 tons.⁠ Thanks largely to private-sector involvement, external financing for the fight against malaria has skyrocketed, from about $100 million a year in 1998 to over $1 billion by 2008. While their current dominance over the global health agenda is counterproductive, these companies need to be at the table, despite their conflicts of interest.

Nor would it be feasible, in today’s world of increasing privatization, to go back to the old model in which the public sector subjects the rest of the world to its global health edicts. Rather, private sector involvement should be expanded to include those companies whose financial interests directly align with those of global health. In addition to mining companies, the fight against malaria could, for example, include insurance companies and tourism operators who will reap long-term profits from healthier customers and less fearful tourists. Similarly, the battle against NCDs could enlist the participation of local farmers and ranchers whose businesses will grow more nutritious, locally sourced whole foods and sell them to more people. Private companies like these, with health-aligned business interests, are much more likely to realize the promise of private-public partnerships than those that have damages to hide.

So far, these other players have largely stayed on the sidelines, and there has been little discernible effort to change that. Cash-strapped for too long, many global health advocates are basking in the resources from their wealthy new private sector partners. But to set the global health agenda right, they’ll need to spend some of those resources reaching out to new companies and industries with compatible concerns, even if those companies don’t sign big checks. With a wider base of private sector donors supporting it, the WHO — still an unparalleled source of public health expertise and uniquely accountable to the international community — could re-establish its authority over the global health agenda, not to mention its own budget.

Research support was provided by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.

Check out a transcript of the speech:

“Not everybody wants to be head of a corporation. Not everybody wants to be among the top sports personalities of their country, to sit on various committees, not everybody wants the best lawyers on their team, not everybody wants to wake up in the morning to jubilation or catastrophe in the headlines. (…)

[S]ome people don’t want to be on TV, or the radio, or in the newspapers. Some people want to watch movies, not perform in them.

Some people want to be in the audience.

Some people want to be cogs. Not because they have to, but because they want to be.”

Your Royal Highness, Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen,

The quote I just gave you, is from the novel ”Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in all the Confusion?”, by the Norwegian award-winning author Johan Harstad. The novel was launched in the U.S. in June 2011.

The novel tells the story of Mattias, a thirtysomething gardener living in Norway, whose idol is Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon. Mattias knows all there is to know about Buzz Aldrin. However, he has learned Buzz Aldrin’s story by reading between the lines about Neil Armstrong.

Neil Armstrong was first, Buzz Aldrin was second. Still, this does not mean that Aldrin’s role was any less important than Armstrong’s. The whole expedition and project formed a team, a machinery. And as you all know, in a machinery every screw, bolt and cog is fundamental. In the Apollo mission, the machinery succeeded in placing man on the moon.

The Transatlantic Science Week 2011 is called ”Innovation Frontiers”. The program here at UC Berkeley will concentrate on renewable energy and climate issues, based on the strengths of UC Berkeley and Norwegian research in these areas. Also, there will be workshops dedicated to space science, education science and marine science and oceans monitoring. At Stanford University later this week, we will look into Silicon Valley, new technologies, innovation and energizing research and education through innovation.

Research is a prerequisite for innovation: We constantly need new knowledge, in order to develop and find solutions to the global challenges. Innovators and the desire for political change and new answers push the science, the research and the researchers forward.

The Apollo 11, which took both Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon, would never have happened without research and the belief that research can move the frontiers of human activity.

The research and new technologies applied to make the Apollo 11 mission possible have also moved the innovation frontiers in many other fields.

The researchers behind the Apollo 11 mission are even less known to most of us than Buzz Aldrin, but the mission would never have happened without them. As Buzz Aldrin, they were cogs in the bigger process. And within their own research fields and research environments, they were heroes.

Innovation requires an enormous machinery and many cogs:

• A solid school system which supplies the higher education institutions with knowledgeable and motivated students.

• Higher education institutions which offer high quality education and which facilitate and inspire researchers in their quest for new knowledge – and not the least inspire new recruits to research.

• Researchers with high skills and high ambitions who are eager to reveal new knowledge, to find new solutions, and to develop new technologies.

• And a system which sees the innovative potential in the findings.

This complexity is well reflected in the Science Week program. The program also grasps the dimension that knowledge production requires cooperation across national borders. The Transatlantic Science Week promotes and facilitates higher education, research and innovation cooperation between Norway and the U.S. and Canada. These two countries are two of Norway’s most important partner countries in these fields.

I am therefore happy to use this event to present to you the new North America Strategy for Higher Education Cooperation 2012-2015 of the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research.

The goal of the new strategy is to increase high quality higher education cooperation between Norway and the U.S. and Canada. The main priorities are:

• Collaboration at government level and network arenas,

• Institutional partnerships and stronger correlation between higher education and research collaboration, and

• Mobility of students and staff

We will spend 10 mill. NOK per year on the follow-up of the strategy. The main measures will be a new call in the Partnership Program and project funding, available to the higher education institutions. This is a chance for new partnerships to unfold. I challenge you all to seize the opportunity.

I believe that the students should benefit from the research cooperation going on between Norwegian and North American partners.

And institutions which have discovered research areas of mutual interest will have a solid foundation also for higher education cooperation. We aim at an increase in partnerships between Norwegian and North American higher education institutions, an increase in joint study provisions, and an increase in the mobility of students and staff.

And we know that the measures work: We have a four year strategy period behind us, during which we have seen an upward trend in the student mobility, especially between Norway and the U.S. – and also more institutional partnerships between Norwegian and North American partners.

However, further success of the strategy is dependent on you: I encourage you all to use these Science Week days to find good cooperation projects which involve your students. They are our future researchers, our future cogs which will transcend the future innovation and research barriers.

I think it is especially appropriate to launch this new strategy here at UC Berkeley, a world leading institution with strong historic ties to Norway. Peder Sather is an important name in the UC Berkeley history, and I believe that the initiative between the Norwegian universities to join forces and establish a “Peder Sather Center for Advanced Study” here will strengthen the already well developed cooperation

OWS Revives the Struggle for Economic Equality

By Sam Pizzigati

The young men and women who launched Occupy Wall Street haven’t yet made our nation one whit less unequal. But these Occupiers have, all the same, overachieved magnificently. They have thrust inequality back into the national limelight­after an absence of generations.

“Disputes over what constitutes economic fairness,” proclaims Bloomberg Businessweek, “are moving to center stage.” Marvels theFinancial Times, “America wakes to the din of inequity.”

An incredible awakening. How incredible? The week before Wall Street’s Occupiers set up camp, Gallup asked Americans to name the nation’s “most important problem.” Only 1 percent cited the “gap between rich and poor.”

That gap ­between the rich and everyone else, the 1 percent and the 99 percent­now looms amazingly larger. The public has noticed what the Occupiers are saying. The public agrees.

How do we know? The savvy pols have pulled back. House majority leader Eric Cantor initially dismissed the occupation as a “mob.” Now he understands Occupiers’ “frustration.” Mitt Romney does, too. “I worry about the 99 percent in America,” Mitt assures. And the top 1 percent? No need, he says, to worry about them: “They’re doing just fine by themselves.”

Mitt doesn’t realize how ridiculous Occupy Wall Street has made this frame seem. With insights and irreverence, the Occupiers are demolishing the inequality apologist’s most basic of claims, that wealth reflects “success.”

Wealth, Occupy signs shout out from front pages, reflects theft and shell games. Outside Chicago, a protester announces: “I can’t afford a lobbyist. I am the 99 percent.” In Los Angeles: “Trickledown made us pee-ons.” In New York: “One day the poor will have nothing left to eat but the rich.”

George Gallup didn’t start polling until the 1930s. So we don’t know exactly how many Americans considered inequality the nation’s “most important problem” a century ago, in plutocracy’s last heyday.

But we do know that three of the four top presidential candidates in 1912­the “Bull Moose” Theodore Roosevelt, the Socialist Eugene Debs and the Democrat Woodrow Wilson­anchored their campaigns in the struggle against wealth’s maldistribution.

Our democracy faced “ruin,” Roosevelt warned, “if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few.” The 1912 incumbent, Republican William Howard Taft, blasted Teddy for “appealing to class hatred.” Taft ended up appealing to virtually no one. Wilson, Roosevelt and Debs together captured 75 percent of the final vote.

American politics a century ago revolved around wealth’s deeply dangerous concentration. Wealth meant to nations, activists preached, what manure meant to farms. Spread evenly, manure enriches the land. With manure concentrated in heaps, the land sours.

The young men and women these activists inspired would two decades later usher in a “New Deal” for America. Unions would “level up” average incomes. Steeply progressive taxes would “level down” incomes at America’s top. By the 1950s our plutocracy had melted away. The fortunes of our remaining rich no longer towered high enough to dominate us.

That more equal America now seems ancient history. Fifty years ago America’s top 400 incomes averaged only $14.6 million each, in today’s dollars. In 2008 our top 400 averaged $270.5 million. The 1961 ultrarich paid, after loopholes, 42.4 percent of their incomes in federal tax. The 2008 ultras paid just 18.1 percent.

At this reality, our contemporary political system merely sighs. Occupy Wall Street is roaring.

Sometimes the roars echo protests past. An Occupier marches past Manhattan’s most elegant manses quoting Edward Filene, an early twentieth-century retail mogul: “Why shouldn’t the American people take half my money from me? I took all of it from them.”

But Occupy Wall Street’s immediate inspiration has come more from Tahrir Square than Teddy Roosevelt, more from the Puerta del Sol in Madrid than Eugene Debs. These overseas movements offer egalitarian visions far beyond any we have entertained.

“A maximum wage for those who live in palaces,” the Egyptian placards read, “a minimum wage for those who live in the graveyards.”

America’s Occupy movement hasn’t, as yet, coalesced around an agenda, visionary or practical. That will come­in time. And this struggle will take time. The movement will have to demonstrate­with small victories­that change can happen. But not too small. The movement cannot afford to shy from broad, bold visions. This challenge the movement seems to fully comprehend.

“If you don’t let us dream,” as a sign read at a Madrid rally in mid-October, “we won’t let you sleep.”

Ina May Gaskin Right Livelihood Award

Ina May Gaskin was born on 8 March, 1940. She is the wife of the first Right Livelihood Award Laureate Stephen Gaskin, who received the Prize with his organisation PLENTY International in 1980.

Ina May Gaskin’s first midwifery experience was in 1970, when she assisted at a birth in a schoolbus on Stephen’s speaking tour of universities and churches prior to the establishment of The Farm, an intentional community in Tennessee, and the subsequent development of Plenty International. This experience inspired her to study midwifery as a way of providing birth choices for women in her country, where the profession of midwifery had been eliminated early in the 20th century, because obstetrical leaders at the time saw no reason for its continued existence, and because of the benefits medicated birth and caesarean sections provide to for-profit hospitals, insurance companies and the drug industry, though often not to the women.

The Farm Midwifery Center

With a strong motivation to become a midwife in a country that lacked opportunities for such an educational path, Gaskin founded The Farm Midwifery Center in 1971. The Center became well known during the 1970s as a place where authentic midwifery was practiced and taught.

When the U.S. caesarian rate was 5% in the early 1970s, the Farm Midwifery Center reported a 1.7% rate. When the U.S. caesarian rate had risen to over 30% in 2005, the rate at the Farm Midwifery Center was still about 2%, even though the practice delivered many twins and breech babies, as well as births by mothers of more than six babies.

Achievements in teaching & campaigning

Over all these years, Gaskin has assisted some 1200 unmedicated births and together with her partners, more than 3000. Her work and expertise have pioneered midwifery education for decades, preserving knowledge mostly forgotten in technically dominated births. Her “Gaskin Maneuver”, an obstetrical procedure she learned from traditional Guatemalan midwives, is now taught internationally. Birth videos have helped promote her techniques for the prevention of protracted labours, routine episiotomies, and for successful breech and twin births.

For more than a decade, Gaskin has led a campaign to promote awareness of the dangers of the use of Cytotec (generic name: misoprostol) to induce labour for reasons of convenience. Her 2000 article published by the online journal Salon.com has been credited with prompting the drug’s manufacturer, G.D. Searle, to issue a letter to all U.S. maternity care providers warning against its use in pregnant women.

Setting standards for midwifery and maternity care

In 1982, recognising the need for high standards for midwifery practice and education, Gaskin became one of the founding members of the Midwives Alliance of North America (MANA). She served on the MANA Board of Directors from 1982 to 2002, and as its President for six years.

MANA later gave rise to the Midwifery Education and Accreditation Council (MEAC), and to the North American Registry of Midwives (NARM), an organisation which created a national competency-based certification credential for U.S. midwives. These developments have led to the passage of laws recognising the NARM midwifery credential in more than half of the states so far. Gaskin and her colleagues have been deeply involved in this process for more than 25 years.

Analysing maternal death rates

In the late 90s, in order to build a valid case for policy recommendations, Gaskin began her study of maternal mortality rates. While anecdotal evidence suggests that rising death rates are at least partly – if not even to a significant degree – due to the rise in caesarean sections and the use of misoprostol to induce labour, autopsies after maternal deaths are rare even in the U.S. In addition, the lack of any mandatory federal standard death certificate makes collecting data difficult and incomplete.

In April 2011, the Maternal Accountability Act got introduced into Congress, which would make mandatory the use of a standard Death Certificate allowing the extent of birth-related deaths to be recorded. Ina May Gaskin has been a fierce supporter of this Act.

Current main fields of activity

In 2011, Ina May Gaskin’s main mission was:

• The Safe Motherhood Quilt Project, in which a quilt is made of patches, each with the name of a woman who died in childbirth in the US since 1982. The Project aims at summoning the national will to take the first step toward lowering the currently rising maternal death rate by creating a consistent, mandatory system for reporting, classifying, and counting the maternal deaths in the US and reviewing and analysing their causes.
• An information campaign, aiming at women, midwives, nurses and physicians, about the potential “side effects” (maternal and fetal death) of using misoprostol to induce labour.
• Teaching. Gaskin has lectured to physicians and midwives throughout the U.S., in Argentina, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Costa Rica, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Germany, Switzerland, Israel, Italy, Austria, France, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Russia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan.
• She also promotes breastfeeding and fights against hospital routines which unnecessarily separate newborns from their mothers, as well as puritanical attitudes which discourage many women from breastfeeding. In some U.S. states it is still unusual for breastfeeding mothers to be seen in public, and some mothers have been threatened with arrest for doing so.

Books & Publications

In 1975, Gaskin’s Spiritual Midwifery was an immediate bestseller and soon became regarded as the bible of home birth and woman-centred midwifery. Having been translated into Dutch, German, Danish, Russian, and Spanish, the book has convinced countless women that labour and birth can be approached without fear, and with confidence that most women’s bodies are still perfectly capable of giving birth. Recent books include Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth (2003), Ina May’s Guide to Breastfeeding(2009), and Birth Matters: A Midwife’s Manifesta (2011). Ina May Gaskin also contributed to an anthology of U.S. midwifes that pioneered the return of that profession in the USA called Into These Hands. Wisdom from Midwives (2011).

In 2009, Gaskin received an Honorary Doctorate from Thames Valley University in London.

Quotation

”A society that places a low value on its mothers and the process of birth will suffer an array of negative repercussions for doing so. Good beginnings make a positive difference in the world, so it is worth our while to provide the best possible care for mothers and babies throughout this extraordinarily influential part of life.”

Then come to Fest-Noz Vraz, the Breton Music and Dance Festival! It will be happening on November 5th from 4pm-11pm at the Hungarian House, located on the Upper East Side.

The event will be celebrating Breton music in North America and will feature over 40 musicians. The schedule is:

4:00pm – 5:30pm : Breton Dance Class
5:30pm – 6:00pm : Irish & Scottish Dance Demonstration
6:00pm – 11:30pm : Fest-noz vraz!

The event costs $25 at the door, but only $20 if you buy your tickets during the presale online.

The Hungarian House is located at 213 East 82nd Street, New York, NY 10028.

Click here for Bagad’s official website and here for a link to the Facebook event page!