“...You need to lose control, to surrender to and trust in the birth process, which takes place without your conscious control. You need to let go of your mind, of everything that you know, and just let it happen. This is a time to turn inwards, to abandon oneself to the unknown, not to think ahead of what is to come. Take it moment by moment; let the natural, involuntary rhythms of your body take over”

There is no right way to give birth, as there is no right way to make love. There is no question of failure....

The energy of birth exists both apart from us and in us, just as sexual energy does. Together they are the energy of creation and we share in both, but we cannot keep them in our control like tamed animals....There must be an opening -- an allowing or letting go -- in the face of something more powerful than ourselves.

Fear is a natural part of contemplating giving birth, because birth is so momentous and has the element of the unknown ...But fear can be reduced to a manageable level by acquiring knowledge and confidence about your ability to handle the intensity, and creating a supportive situation in which to birth.

“You will have to make the possibility of an active birth your own responsibility; you will have to prepare your body to find ease and comfort in upright positions...and you will have to find a [caregiver] who will support you in giving birth actively.”

At the beginning of the fifties, women were almost totally dependent on the new technology of anesthetics and instruments and on the benevolent (male) authorities who wielded them. Most women were unconscious when their babies were delivered. The daughters of these women were left without any tradition of experienced older women who could explain the frightening unknowns of childbirth.

Pregnancy places a woman’s relationships into a new context, makes her more dependent on a social network for help, and creates intense needs for loving support, attention, and acceptance from others.

...The issue is profound. Human infants need to be cared for by a loving adult. That adult is usually the mother, who is faced with her own growing dependency needs. She cannot do the job well in isolation. Late in pregnancy, certainly during the birth itself, and for the early months of infancy, a mother needs protection; she is encumbered by her child and by her biological process. Every time she feels an urge for pickles and ice cream, she is really testing other caregivers in her life. Is there anyone in the family who will take care of her without question? The survival of our species has been based on the answer to that question. Every woman should ask it, one way or another.

From SISTERS ON A JOURNEY: Portraits of American Midwives by Penfield Chester

Ina May Gaskin:

“ What we have in our culture are two very sharply opposed ideas of childbirth. One of them is the traditional Earth Mother -- babies fall out of her and she goes back to work; and then you’ve got birth as probably the most frightening experience awaiting you because it’s the worst pain you’ll ever feel and if you didn’t have a lot of surgery there’d be hell to pay or we’d all be dying. Those are the extremes, and then there are a lot of places in between.... [As a girl] I always wondered about birth and I knew that you had to be brave, and I felt that was good because I knew if I was a guy that I would be drafted and people would try to kill me. What did women have to face? We had to face childbirth, and to me that was a sort of testing that represented a coming of age. This younger generation doesn’t look at it that way and only wants to be tested in the ways that men are tested.”
[On attending births at The Farm community in Tennessee]: “We had 187 babies before we ever had a C-section. Now that’s strange isn’t it? If the medical field has it right about childbirth, then it shouldn’t happen.... something was not scientific here.”

Jeannine Parvati Baker:

“ ‘There’s no way I can deliver your baby. You birth your own baby. I have attended countless births, but I don’t deliver your baby.’ And any time she’s trying to throw me her power, I don’t pick it up....Another profound lesson for women giving birth is in that great fear that we have about birth. We have a fear of pain, a fear of death, and also a fear of loss of control, too, that can correlate to those other two fears. Although when I look at the fear of pain, I see that it is still by and large a culturally induced fear. I know this from studying psychology and anthropology - if you are raised in a tribe that doesn’t believe that birth hurts, then it’s less likely that you will have an excruciating ordeal of birth....I consider it quite natural to have some fear about an unknown experience, especially one that opens up the door to such a great transformation....The ego dies or dissolves when you give birth. You move to a whole other level of consciousness. It’s not just the ‘I’ personally doing it, all myself, alone. You recognize that this baby is participating in the birth...at that moment when I have a baby emerging through me -- I know we’re two beings, but we look like we’re one. It’s a profound spiritual experience.”

Tina Guy:

“I really think that the medical establishment has done a great disservice to women in the whole area of birth....My theory about birth in this country is that we’ve bred passivity into women as far as how they participate in the birth experience. It is almost as if women don’t do what they really need to because they’ve heard so many bad birth stories and that you are supposed to stay in bed....It’s as if they need permission [to get out of bed].”

Edie Wonnell:

“ With birthing, no matter what happens, I want women to come through feeling good about themselves and about their new role as a mother so that they can go on to tackle the next aspect, which is rearing the child. And I do believe that most women have this ability. Some women are more comfortable in hospitals and with that image of the health care system as a Big Daddy who is going to take care of it all. They want to be taken care of as opposed to wanting to take charge because so many of them have lost confidence in the ability of their bodies to do this most natural process; this says a lot about our society. We’ve been through an era where there was a lot of interest in natural childbirth, and then this epidural epidemic kind of thing starts to take over. The health care system is responsible for much of this. For example, having anesthesia departments solely for OB units often results in having anesthesia pushed on women -- they are sold a bill of goods; they are told that this procedure will be a magical cure. They aren’t told that epidurals can produce problems which may result in cesarean sections which often would not have been necessary had the drugs not been given.”

From OBSTETRIC MYTHS VS. RESEARCH REALITIES by Henci Goer

Anthropological theory: Obstetrics is a set of internally consistent rituals designed to reinforce certain core values held by the culture as a whole.

[One] belief arose when a great revolution in thinking gave birth to science and medicine as we understand it. Until the 17th century, the natural world, including the human body, was an awe-inspiring mystery of God, not to be tampered with. The birth of a child was a miracle, too....With the new thinking, the natural world and the human body became conceptualized as mechanisms that could be explored, picked apart, understood, and improved:

This mechanistic model was superimposed over the old one. Therefore, if the human body became a type of machine, then by extension a woman’s body became a defective, untrustworthy machine. It was inclined to break down and function poorly, even when working properly. During pregnancy the added stresses made the female “machine” especially prone to failure. This opened the way for obstetrics, the manly art of interfering, as opposed to midwifery, the womanly art of supporting.

One of the more potent myths of obstetrics is that women and babies have died in large numbers until obstetricians saved them from the ravages of the natural process and the ignorance of midwives. Quite the contrary is true. The endless parade of procedures and drugs that obstetricians have inflicted on women and babies since that time, including the much-lauded forceps, have maimed and killed more women and babies than ever have been saved by their use.

The anthropological model explains why, except for a tiny minority, obstetricians have ignored the fact that medical research shows that intervening is usually unnecessary and frequently causes harm. Belief systems bring order and sense to the chaos of real events by filtering reality to make it conform to or support the tenets of the belief system. In that service, those who have internalized the beliefs will explain away phenomena that do not fit, will not notice inconsistencies, or simply will not “see” something “inconvenient” that is there.

It also explains why normally assertive women meekly acquiesce to, even defend, a system which treats them as fetal containers, bullies them, patronizes them, ignores their wishes, strips them of the rights normally accorded competent adults, and puts them and their babies at risk to boot....Women have been indoctrinated with the same belief system their obstetricians have....It also explains why pregnant women, who are healthy, competent adults, are supposed to cede their autonomy to medical staff. We expect sick or injured people to submit themselves to those who have the knowledge and skills to make them well....by defining childbirth as inherently pathological, we have converted normal childbearing women into “patients.”

The anthropological perspective explains why women do not really have choices, although they are told they do. “Arguing for choice [in childbirth] can be too much like getting a shop to stock two kinds of frozen fish fingers when the issue may be to find somewhere that sells fresh fish.” Belief systems only admit options that do not contradict their beliefs. So a hospital with a 27% cesarean rate, routine IVs, routine electronic fetal monitoring, and no midwives on staff can advertise without seeing the contradiction, “We deliver more babies because we deliver more choices.”

Michel Odent:
“A procedure is dangerous indeed when its main statistical effect is to increase the rate of intervention.”