Born in 1930, Michel Odent initially qualified and worked as a general surgeon. He gradually became more and more interested in issues surrounding childbirth, after being put in charge of a government maternity hospital in Pithiviers, near Paris, in the 1960s and ’70s.

Coming new to the field and fortunate to have both a freshly-trained and an ‘old-school’ midwife to assist him, he soon realized that pregnancy and childbirth were not things with easy or clear-cut answers. This led him to develop various practices which he later checked out through extensive research, both within the field of obstetrics and on a cross-disciplinary basis. As the years progressed, he came to feel more and more that childbirth was at its safest when the normal physiological processes were left to take place undisturbed.

In the 1980s he moved to London, where he set up the Primal Health Research Centre and practised as a homebirth midwife. His research has spanned topics such as preconceptional and prenatal care, nutrition in pregnancy, childbirth itself, breastfeeding and childhood vaccinations.

Frequently interviewed on television, in radio programmes and in the popular press, he has become known as the pioneer of the use of water during labour and homelike hospital birthing rooms.

He is the author of numerous scientific papers and 11 books, including The Caesarean, The Farmer and the Obstetrician, The Scientification of Love, Birth and Breastfeeding, Primal Health, Water and Sexuality and perhaps his most well-known title: Birth Reborn.

Michel Odent talking about Preparing for a Healthy Birth

Often, women who talk a lot about the birth of their babies are those who had a difficult birth, problems and so on. And women who had a very easy birth tend not to talk about that. I have a very good example: my daughter, who has three children. Although she has a strong intellect—she’s a professor of medical genetics—she would never talk about the birth of her babies. Never! Because for her it has always been so simple. The last one: contractions begin at 7 o’clock, baby born at 7.55. So I think it might be good to say some-where that this book is special. It’s full of accounts we can learn from.

Usually, I recommend that pregnant women should not read too many books. I tell them they should rest their intellect, listen to the music they love, go swimming, do whatever it is they like to do. That’s much more important. They don’t need to know too much because they lose their sense of proportion. If they read a medical dictionary they will find all sorts of... well... But this book is an exception. It’s a book written by a mother with experience of undisturbed birth, who knows what birth can be like.And that’s different.

It’s unusual.