Suzanne Arms

Suzanne Arms
File:Suzanne Arms smiling.jpg
Born	Suzanne Arms (1945-04-19) April 19, 1945
Occupation	Author, photo-journalist, social activist
Citizenship	U.S.
Education	BA (Hons.) in English and Literature
Alma mater	University of Rochester, New York
Genre	Health, Parenting, Psychological, Social
Subject	Public health, Childbirth, Adoption
Notable works	Immaculate deception: A new look at women and childbirth in America (1977) Breastfeeding: How to Breastfeed Your Baby (2004) Immaculate Deception II: Myth, Magic and Birth (2011) A Season to Be Born (1973) Immaculate Conception (1979)
Notable awards	Lamaze International Lifetime Achievement Award

Suzanne Arms is an author, photojournalist, speaker, and activist on birthing issues and the bond within, and care of, the mother-baby system. She has written seven books on pregnancy, birthing, breastfeeding, bonding and adoption. Her second book, Immaculate Deception: A New Look at Childbirth, was named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times. Its 1975 edition sold over 250,000 copies. Arms is an advocate for public health policies and societal practices that support human and family development, including the area of human rights.

Early life

Arms was born on April 19, 1945, in Camden, New Jersey, to parents who were both teachers. She studied English and literature at the University of Rochester in New York, minoring in cross-cultural studies, graduating with honors in 1965. She subsequently moved to Northern California and worked for several years as a teacher in nursery schools and in the Head Start Program, and as a dancer in a modern jazz dance company. She was a freelance feature writer and photographer with the weekly newspaper, The Pacific Sun, published in Marin County, California. In the late 1960s, Arms helped organize the West Coast's Spring Mobilization for Peace and volunteered with the American Friends Service Committee as a trained draft counselor and an advocate for ending capital punishment. She wrote her first book, A Season to be Born, as an illustrated diary of her own experience giving birth.

Childbirth activism

In 1970 Arms gave birth to her daughter, Molly, an experience she described as "traumatic" due to the prevailing obstetric practices. She began to document the homebirth-midwifery movement and her research informed her view that hospitals were organized around the needs of doctors and insurance companies rather than the mother and baby Her research in medical libraries, and her face-to-face interviews of residents, nurses and mothers, formed the basis for her second book, Immaculate Deception: A New Look At Women and Childbirth.

Arms has criticized the routine use of potentially risky drugs and interventions, such as unnecessary labor induction, major anesthesia, epidurals, and episiotomies. She is strongly critical of the over-use of cesarean surgery, (especially cesareans conducted without any labor, known as "scheduled cesareans"). She has also strongly advocated for the ending of male circumcision.

Arms advocates the use of homebirth and freestanding birth centers for healthy pregnant women. She has cited research in Europe showing that birth outcomes in hospitals do not significantly improve once cesareans exceed a rate of 7 per cent. According to Arms, birthing practices in the US and in other developed countries are overly risk averse, which has led to the evolution of "just-in-case obstetrics," resulting in "a multi-billion dollar, self-regulated industry."

Organizations

Arms is a founding member of several non-profit organizations. She taught courses at the Holistic Childbirth and Health Institute in San Francisco, in 1977, for which she created a syllabus and taught on the evolution of childbirth practices. A year later she co-founded one of the US's first freestanding birth centers, The Birth Place, near Stanford University Medical Center, in Palo Alto, California. Before the birth center opened, she was involved in the opening of a resource center that provided information on childbirth-related options, including local questionnaires on local physicians' attitudes and practices, and information and support for parenting during pregnancy and in the postpartum period. At its height, the center was responding to 5,000 visits and telephone inquiries annually and had 500 paying members. It became a state-licensed facility for non-medicated childbirth in 1979. Approximately one hundred babies were delivered in the center by 1984. Researchers from Stanford University assessed 251 births at The Birth Place over a three-year period and found that approximately 80 per cent gave birth at the center with around 20 per cent being transferred to a hospital because of possible complications. Just over 50 per cent who delivered at the center gave birth without any form of medication or intervention.

In the late 1970s, Arms was a founding board member of the Planetree Alliance, a San Francisco-based non-profit that created the first public/consumer health resource center and model hospitals project. She is also a founding member of The Alliance for Transforming the Lives of Children, an information and research resource for how to support parents in conceiving, gestating, birthing and rearing babies and children.

Arms is the founder and director of Birthing The Future, a Colorado-based non-profit/charity that creates educational media products, organizes international symposia and roundtables, and trainings for birth advocates, as well as supervising of employees on childbirth units. It also acts as a support and resource for midwives, doulas, birth educators and advocates, for issues related to conception and pregnancy, birthing, mother-baby and father-family bonding and breastfeeding. Arms was a founding member of the Coalition for Improving Maternity Services (CIMS), a grass-roots advocacy organization that produced the 10 Step Mother-Baby Initiative.

Awards

Arms has been awarded the Lamaze International Lifetime Achievement Award for her contribution to the field of childbirth.

Documentaries

Arms has created several educational films on pregnancy and birth. "Giving Birth" shows the differences between the medical and physiological-midwifery paradigms for birth. It includes contributions from birth educators, doulas, midwives, hospitals and university women’s studies programs. Arms also directed and co-produced the film "Birth" with Christopher Carson, which is critical of the medical-pharmaceutical-hospital approach to birth, proposing a different approach.

Books

• A Season to Be Born (1973) (with John Arms)
• Immaculate Deception: A New Look at Women and Childbirth in America (1975, 1977, 1985)
• To Love and Let Go (1983)
• Adoption: A Handful of Hope (1985)
• Seasons of Change: Growing Through Pregnancy & Birth (1993)
• Immaculate Deception II: Myth, Magic and Birth (1994 & 1997)
• Breastfeeding: How to Breastfeed Your Baby (2004)