Front page of the Wall Street Journal!

Get this - I got a call on Saturday morning from one of my midwife colleagues who told me that she was sitting down with the WSJ and having her morning tea, when to her great surprise she saw my picture on the front page! Yes, really, I was on the front page of the Saturday August 4, 2007 issue of the Wall Street Journal - below the fold, but none-the-less! The article titled New Labor Moves:Belly Dancing Hits Delivery Room is about using belly dance in the birth room - or as the article puts it "the delivery room".

Here is the story...

I presented "Belly Dance for Pregnancy and Birth" at the Partners in Perinatal Health conference this past May. This was a presentation geared toward birth professionals to introduce the idea that belly dance is a birth dance, and to teach the participants about how it can be used during pregnancy, labor and birth.

Rachel Zimmerman - the author of the WSJ article - was among the attendees that day, and approached me because she thought there might be a "story". And I guess she was right!

So after dozens of emails exchanges and phone calls with her, this is what she came up with. Here is a link to the article. (I am told that this link may have a limited life-span. If so, you can look up the article in the paper's archives, but you have to be a subscriber to read the whole thing...)

I think she did a pretty good job of distilling all the information I gave her, and she did a really good job researching the "phenomenon" across the country. Unfortunately, journalists being under the constraints of their editors, she was forced to cut a lot of material...

Pretty cool, huh?

Can I start calling myself the Belly Dance and Birth pundit?