From Janis' Desk

The doctors started complaining that patients were asking to not birth on their backs, etc. My boss would take those evidence-based slides out of my presentation, keeping the doctors happy and the patients misinformed. Finally, when she forbid me to use the phrase ‘infant instincts’, I just had to quit this job!

Someone who works for medical facilities but does not teach Lamaze curricula, isn’t authentic. So, unless it’s Chocolate from Hershey, PA, it isn’t the REAL Thing!

While pregnancy, labor, birth, and breastfeeding are the same since Eve, the world’s reaction to childbearing has suffered great perversions. Men (not women) became scribes and wrote down the storytellings of life. Not having vaginas, estrogen, progesterone, and...

You probably have heard of the phenomenon of Informed Consent. There also exists alongside it, Informed Refusal. What those two consents share in common is information -- not hearsay, rumor, Internet-hysteria, or popularity. It is not likely that your care-provider...

Babies are born knowing how to latch and breastfeed perfectly; so, we should stay out of their way.I learned and taught the American Method/Model of Breast- feeding from 1976 through 2007.

Much of childbirth education is devoted to showing expectant people which positions to assume when laboring, pushing, birthing and breastfeeding. I do not. Positions and “holds” set up a criterion for how to do it right and how it is done wrong. In support of the...

Here's a conversation that Janis had with a pregnant lady in Kailua, Hawaii.Letter to Janis from her son Matt after Janis dragged CPR dolls from Hawaii to Virginia to teach them Infant CPRApril 14, 2008 Subject: Thank You for our CPR Training! Mom, I want you to know...

Ever since MAN started “helping” WOMAN birth her babies, women have had a major problem: Men deciding what will make birth better for women. Men decided we would birth better against gravity by keeping us on our backs in the “stranded beetle” position.

A quick stroll through the aisles of the baby department in stores today amazes me. Just the other day saw “special” soap to get milk stains out of baby bottles. It is not like it is spaghetti sauce, and when we talk about breast milk, it rinses off and out of everything. Formula will stain the couch, the carpet and the cat… but a special soap?