You know that pregnancy guide, the one that practically has its own aisle in the big bookstores? The one that’s been on the New York Times best seller list for-ever (391 weeks)?

Well, it’s off! The Times Book Review wonders if the birth rate is falling along with the economy, but this author wonders if women aren’t skipping past the What To Expect display and buying books that give them more info and less of a talking to, books like… Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth (Ina May Gaskin), The Big Book of Birth (Erica Lyon), The Complete Book of Pregnancy and Childbirth (Sheila Kitzinger), Birthing From Within (Pam England), From the Hips (Rebecca Odes and Ceridwen Morris), Our Bodies Ourselves: Pregnancy and Birth, and maybe even Pushed?

OK magazine and other tabloids are reporting that Angelina Jolie, very pregnant with twins, is awaiting labor with a midwife and two French nurses in Monaco — and hoping for a normal, vaginal birth. Jolie’s first baby was breech and she gave birth by C-section. “She prepared for a natural child birth for Shiloh and was very disappointed when her doctors told her she would have to undergo a Cesarean section,” a friend told OK!.

Women carrying twins in the U.S. have a hard enough time finding a provider willing to support a physiological labor and vaginal delivery. Many women are told they will have to labor in an operating room with a mandatory epidural, and that if either baby is breech they will move to surgery, because most providers now lack the know-how to deliver breech (like Jolie’s first OB).  Women wanting vaginal birth after cesarean (VBAC) are also facing major obstacles, like physicians and hospitals who simply refuse them.

Achieving a supported twin VBAC in the U.S. would be a long, bumpy, uphill battle — maybe even for a celebrity. Did Jolie, like so many C-section moms, try and fail to find a willing provider? Did she encounter hospitals with official VBAC bans? Physicians whose insurance policies prohibit them from delivering twins, or midwives whose licensing regulations prevent them from attending VBACs? Was she pushed to give birth in Europe? Maybe we’ll find out after the twins arrive.

While this author has been busy traveling and speaking (see the “Tour” schedule here), the birth blogosphere has been putting out some great material worth directing your attention to. First, check out Tina Cassidy’s VBAC chronicles. Bostonian and author of Birth: A Surprising History of How We Are Born, Cassidy gave birth to her first baby by unplanned cesarean four years ago. When she became pregnant again last year, she started investigating her options and, like many women, found little support for a vaginal birth after cesarean (VBAC) at local hospitals and even birth centers. So she decided to find a midwife and order a birth tub. Read all about her “HBAC” here (start with “Installment #1″ for the full narrative).

New York women, you’ll especially be interested in this recent post on the NYC Moms blog about one woman’s dissatisfaction with her birth experience at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital. This mom wanted a normal, drug-free labor, as she’d had with her first baby. But, she writes, “I don’t judge anyone who has had or wants an epidural now that I have had one for my second child. I understand why people get them. We live in a culture of fear (of pain, consequences, failure) and instant gratification and an era of a disproportionate sense of entitlement. Mostly, however, I blame the environment one labors in.” The blog is titled, “Epidurals Are For Tolerating the Hospital, Labor Is The Easy Part.”

How would you rate your birth environment? If you gave birth in NYC in the past three years, you can fill out the online Birth Survey. It’s a new initiative, in pilot stage, of the Coalition for Improving Maternity Services (CIMS); the Survey hopes to go national next year and build a database of feedback and ratings on providers and hospitals across the country–think of it as a Zagat’s of maternity care. It’s part of a larger movement toward “transparency in health care.”

Finally, a little gossip: the British celebrity site Fametastic reports that Minnie Driver, due to give birth in late summer, is planning a home water birth.

Dear Christina,

I know, I know. You must be getting tons of advice about pregnancy, motherhood, etc. right now. You get the bump, and suddenly everybody feels like butting in. So my apologies straight off for joining the choir. Let me also say that making babies, having babies, not having babies — it’s all about choice. So the way you give birth is ultimately your choice to make, and you have that right. I’m writing this letter because I hear you’ve chosen to schedule a cesarean section…

Read more at Huffington Post.

Maybe you’ve already heard about Ricki Lake’s “awesome” vagina — she included the waterbirth of her second child in the fantastic documentary The Business of Being Born (Lake produced it, Abby Epstein directed it). But now, six months after the film’s premiere, on the other side of the globe, Lake’s movie is being taken a bit more seriously: it’s being likened to Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth.

With an election weeks away, Australia’s What Women Want party is calling for maternity care reform to be as big of an issue as global warming, and party leaders have enlisted Ms. Lake as their celebrity spokeswoman. Like in the U.S., nearly a third of Australian women give birth by major surgery, and the government is not promoting home birth as an alternative. Lake says she’s calling for more choice.

Want to see the film? Click here for a list of sneak previews being held around the country. I’ll be speaking at one in Des Moines tomorrow, November 6.

Reading about Britney Spears losing custody of her two boys reminded me of how the “Oops” pop star was an unlikely muse for sculptor Daniel Edwards a couple years ago. Perhaps Edwards began casting the life-size nude (which looks nothing like Spears) before her scheduled C-section, because this piece refreshingly depicts a physiological birth position (and though it’s not pictured, you can see a baby’s head crowning from behind.) Maybe it also represents a sort of parallel universe in which Spears is the poster girl for good birthing rather than bad parenting…

Welsh child classical vocalist turned pop star Charlotte Church started her family young (she’s 21), giving birth to a baby girl last week. Unlike her American peer Britney Spears, though, Church didn’t plan a C-section. She gave birth at home with a midwife, as many UK women do (not just celebs). In fact, earlier this year the British Health Minister announced plans to guarantee every mum a midwife-attended home birth by 2009. “We believe that, given a genuine, properly-supported choice many women would choose a home birth. Part of this strategy is to ensure that a home birth becomes a serious and realistic option.” In Wales, the goal is for 10% of women to birth at home. The health minister there said, “I hope that with guidance and help more mothers will consider home births as [a] preferred option for delivering their babies.”

Things sure are different across the pond!

It being Sunday, let’s indulge in a little celebrity gossip, shall we? The tremendous actor Naomi Watts, who gave birth to a baby boy this summer (the father is the also tremendous actor Liev Schreiber), plays a biker midwife in the forthcoming David Cronenberg film Eastern Promises. Watts found out she was pregnant while filming, and told Good Morning America that the professional education served her personally as well. “I was doing all this research of midwifery and turning up at hospitals and watching live births…And there I was, pregnant all that time!” (Watch the clip here). She hasn’t gone public with too much detail, but it sounds like she had a physiological birth: “…the whole birth thing is such a physical and dramatic experience. You’re so in your body that it’s almost an out-of-body experience,” she told Canwest News Service. “I keep replaying the birth in my mind because it was so powerful.”