Your Pregnancy Week By Week, 5th Edition (Your Pregnancy Series)

I was thoroughly disappointed by this book. I've done a lot of research about pregnancy and childbirth and was hoping this book would be a nice way to keep up with my baby's development and the changes going on in my body. The information presented in the book is barely informative. The doctors give a tiny bit of information about every single complication that could possibly arise in pregnancy (no matter how rare) and it really just serves to get a pregnant lady a bit paranoid! Meanwhile, if you actually had any of these complications, you would certainly need more thorough information than what is presented in this book. There's also a severe lack of information about the accuracy/reliability of the various tests and procedures associated with pregnancy, labor, and delivery.
The back cover claims that the book is "the most medically up-to-date" however there is blatant misinformation given about home births. It states in no uncertain terms that home births are NOT SAFE. However the most medically up-to-date research actually finds that for healthy women at low risk for complications who choose skilled and experienced caregivers and have a good system in place for transfer to a hospital when necessary, giving birth at home is JUST AS SAFE as giving birth in a hospital. There is also research showing that moms who planned to give birth at home (regardless of where they actually had their babies) ended up with fewer interventions, such as episiotomies and c-sections, compared with a group of equally low-risk women who had planned hospital deliveries.
The best two features of the book are the weekly updates about fetal developement and the weekly exercises. In my opinion, you're better off using one of the many pregnancy websites for updates about fetal development (like [...]) and reading The Thinking Woman's Guide to a Better Birth.

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