Lori Wrankle: Desert Birthright, Kartoniert / Broschiert

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The coming-of-age memoir of a homebirth midwife in the Southwest

Lori Wrankle was sixteen when she helped deliver her first baby. "I witnessed the entire universe unfold at my feet," she writes in Desert Birthright . Later, working as a hospital doula, Wrankle observed firsthand the suffering inflicted upon birthing women by male-dominated Western childbirth practices, from casual racism to unnecessary and nonconsensual procedures, including the dreaded "husband stitch." After a traumatic labor and delivery of her own, she decided to take back woman-centered childbirth and start a homebirth midwifery practice.

Desert Birthright traverses twenty-five years of midwifery, often in fundamentalist polygamist circles, weaving together birth stories with childhood memories as Wrankle grapples with her shifting Mormon faith. Her poetic voice shines--a placenta becomes the tree of life, the folds in a baby's arm layers of sand in the desert. Desert Birthright is a deeply personal story of life, death, and modern womanhood in the rural Southwest, and of one midwife's journey of faith, self-discovery, and liberation in the face of adversity.