I just finished reading another book about the history of childbirth. This one was called Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth. I half expected it to be a repeat of Birth Day, which I finished reading earlier this month, or at least similar to Birth: A Surprising History of How We are Born (the covers are even similar). I was pleased to discover that this book stood on its own as an interesting and absorbing tale—the emphasis was really on the recent history of childbirth, up to and including sperm banking and cryo-preserving eggs. I will share a full review soon, but I first wanted to share one of the new things I learned from the book. In the chapter on Freebirthing, the author shares the story of Pat Carter, a woman in the 1950’s who had seven unassisted births and wrote a “manifesto” about unassisted birth called Come Gently, Sweet Lucina (the book I had heard of, the rest of the historical information, I had not). She called her theory of birth euthagenesis (“good origin”). It didn’t really catch on and the author of Get Me Out states that euthagenesis is one of the “few un-Google-able terms.” So, I instantly wanted to write a post and make it googleable 😉 Of course, I did google it prior to posting and lo and behold I did get a single result, Rixa Freeze’s dissertation Born Free: Unassisted Childbirth in North America. So, darn, I didn’t get to put it on the map first after all! Rixa is so awesome that I can forgive her for that though 😉