I am, regardless of the answer to that question, reviewing What to Expect When You’re Expecting and Safe Natural Remedies for the Discomforts of Pregnancy from within rather than without. This may be off-putting to those of you who are not pregnant – you may skip to the next review if that’s how you feel – but I assume that these books are written for the pregnant and that they should be reviewed (if the review is to make any sense at all) by someone who is in that state.

A weird state it is. People who have never touched one in one’s life before approach and pat one’s blooming abdomen. One does strange things. I went to a Tupperware party and bought something! Then I had black dreams of becoming a Tupperware believer and watching my true love’s affection turn to scorn as my spirit turned to plastic. One gets very tired. One’s body plays all sorts of tricks, not all of the comfortable.

The discomforts are addressed in thirty sensible pages by some people called the Coalition for the Medical Rights of Women in Safe Natural Remedies for the Discomforts of Pregnancy. The Coalition itself is veiled in mystery. No address is given apart from ‘California’. This particular little volume was put together by the Coalition’s Over-The-Counter-Drug Committee, whose members are named, and edited for Australia by Abigail Villis.

Mysterious it may be, but the Coalition sounds dedicated, knowledgeable and authoritative. Its advice is practical and it works. The information given is succinct and specific the point of naming safe and unsafe brand-names. This is a neat, short book for quick reference.

What to Expect When You’re Expecting is as the title suggests rather more twee then the Coalition’s thirty pages. Arlene Eisenberg and her two daughters, Heidi Eisenberg Murkoff and Sandee Eisenberg Hathaway (when, she asks, comes the urge to lumber oneself with one’s father’s name as well as one’s husband’s?), have produced a ‘US Best Seller’ with this one. Their work has been subjected to revision by the Childbirth Education Association of Australia (NSW).

It’s not a bad book, but touts itself as a ‘comprehensive pregnancy guide’ and it is certainly not that. Even after the Australian revision, there are glaring gaps reflecting either the structure of the American health system or oversights by the Australian editors. The most prominent of these gaps is the neglect of the public health system. It is assumed that every woman will select an obstetrician and work with him or her to the conclusion of the pregnancy. A one-to-one relationship, rather like the relationship that each woman is assumed to have already with her internist or her allergist, will be established. This annoyed me. I’m not that kind of woman. I do not even know what an internist is. I am a public patient! Further, I am quite certain that I am not alone in this, and I am equally certain that every day in Australia many babies are delivered in public hospitals by public hospital staff. This is so completely ignored in What to Expect When You’re Expecting as to suggest that to be public is to be abnormal.

The only mention of home births, by the way, is of the kind that happens when your baby is born so quickly that you don’t arrive at the hospital in time. For the authors of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, birth is very much a matter controlled by medical professionals on their own ground.

Nevertheless, so confident are the authors of the comprehensive nature of their work they do not include a further reading list. The Coalition for the Medical Rights of Women managed to squeeze one in even though they only had thirty pages to play with. At the same time, Eisenberg et al deal inadequately with some of the ground that they do cover. For example, on page 7, it is said that during childbirth ‘your cervix will begin to thin (effacement)’ and this is the last and only description of cervical effacement in the book. Now, although mine has not done it yet, I understand that effacement of the cervix is an important thing. If I was relying on What to Expect When You’re Expecting, I would not have any clear idea what it involves.

Pregnancy is a time when one tends to lust for accurate knowledge about one’s body. The Eisenbergs’ volume is a pleasantly indulgent read particularly if one is not the sort of woman who habitually grinds her teeth when a woman’s partner is blindly and consistently referred to as her ‘husband’ but it is not a source of hard-core fact. It does not leave one with the sense of understanding or control. This is perhaps because the authors genuinely perceive the woman in childbirth as a vessel, albeit the best possible one if she’s prepared to work at it. I point to the statement on the vexed episiotomy question as an example:

‘What decision should the expectant mother make on episiotomies? None. She can form an opinion and can discuss this opinion with a doctor or nurse-midwife so that it can be taken into account at the time of the childbirth. But the decision is going to be made, and should be made, by the birthing attendant.’

If during my pregnancy I had time to read only one volume of around 350 pages, I would choose something more informative and more reassuring than What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Sheila Kitzinger’s Pregnancy and Childbirth (Doubleday, 1972) is far better value at the same size around the same price.