Birth As You Please, an exciting and unique multimedia project about the birthing & motherhood stories of 21 women around the world, was published through Riza Press in 2020.
About the Book
Twenty one mothers from around the world unite their voices in the book “Birth As You Please” to share their birth stories and portraits in order to inspire, empower, and advocate the right to choose how to give birth: where, when and with whom. This is a book where the diversity of the birth-giving experience will be portrayed through colors and words, and where art is used as a medium that elevates human existence and immortalizes the essence of motherhood.
Birth As You Please will feature the stories of each of the women interviewed by Amancaya Xristina both written in their own language and translated into English. Accompanying each story is a breathtaking portrait made by the author herself, representative of the woman’s story.
This is a book celebrating the process of motherhood, pregnancy, and one’s entry into life. It showcases women from different cultures as they carry their children into this world. The book also explores cultural questions of what the best method of birth is, and advocates for a woman’s right to choose how her baby will enter the world, hence the title “Birth as You Please”.
Meet Amancaya Xristina
“Being an artist, a doula and a social entrepreneur I found in my motherhood journey, the inspiration to contribute to the higher cause of women’s well being. I am in the process of creating a birth stories Art book, “Birth As You Please” because I sense the urgency of adding ideas and research to the dialogue around how birth can be more humane and how women, birthing people, all around the world, in many different cultures can inspire each other to rediscover their life giving capabilities.
My intention to write the book, “Birth as You Please”, is to create a reference point where twenty one mothers from around the world can connect through their individual birth stories in a creative manner and be inspired to become agents of paradigm change in the way they birth their children, in their own individual cultural, social contexts, remembering and reclaiming the right to birth as they please, safely and respected. Women will learn from how other women carry their babies in the womb and how they give birth to them.”
Xristina’s Birth Art
“I invite women to honor and love their bodies while they go through any type of transition and transformation hormonal, emotional, physical, social, geographical and spiritual… through art, because art is healing.”
Riza Press 