"This teaching will help us return to a wisdom we all have in our very bones. When free of the often destructive messages we imbibe from our culture, consciousness and conscience become the keys to successful parenting, family life, and world community. We ignore these lessons at deep peril to ourselves and our children." David H. Albert, author of And the Skylark Sings with Me: Homeschooling and Community-Based education
American women today are facing a tragic loss. With the dominance of technological birth practices in the United States today, the American mother and child are being robbed of the simple and natural process of birth and bonding. Nature’s organic program, built into the hard wiring of humans for millennia, has been disrupted and almost lost during the past eighty-five years. A mother’s ability to bond with her offspring during and after the process of birth is the most significant and essential characteristic of all mammalian females—especially human females—on this planet. This innate ability and the mother’s knowledge that accompanies it have been so exploited, distorted, and trivialized by commercial thinking and conditioning that we no longer even see our loss.
Scientific evidence points clearly to the destruction of the very fabric of our society if we do not restore birthing and bonding to the powers of the feminine.
These negative behaviors, the increasing curve of childhood diseases, childhood learning disabilities, juvenile violence, kids at-risk and willful self-destructiveness clearly evident in the anxiety-driven young people our society is producing in such numbers today, become increasingly common with every passing decade.
If we look back just seventy or eighty years, we see that children rarely suffered from so many of the crippling problems that are such a common part of childhood’s landscape today: chronic stress, learning deficits, hyperactivity, lack of concentration, autism, youthful eating disorders, preteen sexuality, alcoholism, drug use, childhood suicide, violently oppositional behavior, childhood crime, and even juvenile murder.
These problems were rarely heard of and were often undreamed of in a gentler, less complex child-raising era. The process of the new parenting suggests that many of these behaviors are a direct result of the flawed obstetric philosophies that separate mother and child, and more, that these behaviors can be reduced if not entirely reversed by returning to the old “new” ways of birthing and bringing up children.
Model Birth
Our Western society’s core value system, Robbie Davis-Floyd points out, is oriented toward a scientific worldview that is sponsored in an undisguised way by large medical institutions governed by profit-driven medical ideologies. Given this tendency towards a technological bias, our culture has as a matter of course developed a cyborglike model of the human body. In a mechanized philosophy that barely recognizes the intuitive and interior sides of man and woman, it is only natural that modern medicine views human beings as sophisticated cyborgs that when ailing are best restored to their proper functioning by mechanistic interventions such as prescriptive chemicals and appropriate surgeries.
An unfortunate side effect of this mechanized view of the body and of medicine as an industrial trade is that many doctors now look on their profession not as a divine calling or even as a dedicated life work, but simply as “just another business.”
Because the robotic prototype of the human body has become effectively the working basis of all modern medicine, it comes as no surprise that this same mechanistic metaphor has been carried over to the birthing room, where high-tech equipment and no-nonsense (that is, emotionally uninvolved) medical practitioners “cure” the female “patient” of her disorder: the “nine-month disease” of pregnancy.
As the factory production of goods became the central organizing metaphor for social life, it also became the dominant metaphor for birth: the hospital became the factory, the mother’s body became the machine, and the baby became the produce of an industrial manufacturing process. Obstetrics was thereby enjoined to develop tools and technologies for the manipulation and improvement of the inherently defective process of birth, and to make birth conform to the assembly-line model of factory production.
Never mind whether this assembly-line method of delivering newborns works well. Through years of jockeying and politics and finagling and brainwashing on the part of those who profit most from the medical model of birth, the hospital system is now a sacred norm. To suggest that there is a better, safer, kinder even an ecstatic way of having a child is looked on by a majority of people as a heresy, ingratitude towards the life improving marvels of technology, and a suicidal return to the medicine of the Middle Ages.
Yet such an attitude is itself part of the cultural bias as has been clear for over twenty years, most routine obstetrical procedures have little or no scientific evidence to justify them. They are routinely performed not because they make scientific sense, but because they make cultural sense. They exemplify certain fundamental aspects of technocratic life.
I began to think seriously about why and how it was the case that women’s knowledge didn’t count while medical knowledge carried the day. Which kind of knowledge was ‘correct’ obviously wasn’t the decisive factor.
Cesarean birth has, of course, become heavily politicized today, and some doctors and medical organizations, citing the “hygienic” and “safety” benefits of this procedure, are lobbying to make cesarean sections (c-sections) an optional choice for all pregnant American mothers. Never mind, as Michel Odent, one of the world’s foremost scientific authorities on childbirth warns in his book The Caesarean:
“In the early to mid-twentieth century, before medical instrumentation took over the delivery room, the need for such surgical procedures was minimal. Statistically speaking, Odent reports, feedback from electronic fetal monitoring machines (compared simply to listening to the mother’s heartbeat with a stethoscope) is often so undependable that many cesarean births not only prove clinically uncalled for, but also later end up creating physical complications for the mother, the infant, or both, that continue for years.”
Joseph Chilton Pearce, one of the world’s foremost writers on child development and new parenting methods, and a thinker whose ideas I refer to frequently, tells us in decidedly unequivocal terms:
“Hospital-medical childbirth now made sacrosanct and unquestioned on every hand is a more insidious and devious danger than atomic bombs or germ warfare, since unrecognized and even unrecognizable by the public at large for the demonic force it is. Taking away a woman’s rights over her own reproductive process has been a disaster; but intervening and all but abolishing the bonding of mother with infant at birth is a devastating crime against nature; perhaps the most criminal and destructive act on the planet today, and an ultimate, if slow but sure, instrument for “species” suicide.
Sane Birth
I had been using the ideas and body of work of Joseph Chilton Pearce, whom I had met and studied with many years before. But like most couples we were still under the spell of the cultural conditioning about how frightening birth was and that to think of doing it in any way other than in a hospital and with a doctor was tantamount to a suicidal decision.
We visited three OBGYN’s whom I knew of through my professional circles, and our experiences left us both stunned and disappointed. This was not the way we wanted to give birth to our baby, nor with these unfeeling and uncaring doctors. There is a full, humorous and sobering description of our experience with the OBGYN’s in our book – The Art of Conscious Parenting
So although we had been very knowledgeable about alternative medicine we had had no experience with midwives or natural birth.
After many hours of discussion and after mentally reviewing much of Joe Pearce’s work and the many reports I’d read through the years on natural childbirth, at the recommendation of a colleague whose wife had gone this route, we finally did something that until now our conditioned fears had vetoed: we made an appointment to speak with a midwife.
We found out that midwives are not simply birth mechanics or towel-handlers at a delivery. They are skilled medical professionals. Before practicing their profession, they must earn a two-year master’s degree in their field, then pass rigorous state testing, and then undergo a prolonged period of on-site learning and apprenticeship. Many start out as registered nurses who go on to earn a master’s degree in midwifery.
After meeting basic educational requirements, the midwife may take a certification exam administered by a major professional organization such as the North American Registry of Midwives. Most significantly, while most obstetricians are trained to look for pathology and have lost trust in a pregnant woman’s natural ability to birth, midwives believe deeply that if proper conditions are created, any healthy pregnant woman can give birth with a minimum of help from other people and no need for medical intervention.
My wife and I were intrigued—so intrigued that at our first meeting we were not all that surprised to discover that our midwife-to-be was a veritable encyclopedia of obstetric knowledge and professional expertise. What did surprise and delight us was that she also understood how fragile and elemental an event childbearing is for a pregnant couple and how essential it is that those who oversee the blessed event stand beside the parents with compassionate advocacy and support.
This imposing woman, we further learned from testimonials, had already delivered more than two hundred babies—all of them safely and soundly—and seemed to know everything there was to know on the subject of childbirth. Nor was her knowledge limited to the delivery process alone. It encompassed a spectrum of related subjects, including nutrition, natural pain control, and postpartum bonding methods, useful medications, body massage, pre- and post-natal exercises, psychological self-care, and many other tricks of the birthing trade that women who go the conventional medical route are almost never told. Clearly, we had found what we were looking for.
Making a Birth Plan
Each subsequent visit we made to our midwife lasted for at least an hour. During these sessions our questions were answered in full, and a great deal of additional information—some of it unanticipated and unexpected—was deposited in our ever-enlarging knowledge bank. Then one day during a teaching session, our midwife informed us that it was time to write out a birth plan—that is, to devise a document describing in detail the ways in which we wanted our child to be born. She told us that it should include the location of the birth (hospital, birthing center, or at home); religious ceremonies to be practiced; the father’s role in delivery; instructions about cutting the umbilical cord; and actions and activities to avoid. Whatever personal preferences both Dalit and I had should be listed on the plan. Our midwife promised us that these instructions would be followed to every extent possible on the day of the birth.
Our Great Day of Joy
The birthing room at Roosevelt Hospital was ready when we arrived. Our midwife, Anna, was waiting for us with several aides who would attend the birth, as was Sigrid Nelsson-Ryan, chief birth educator at Roosevelt Hospital. Our helpers began by filling the room with the aromatic candles we had requested in our birth plan and by playing a variety of classical music that we brought with us from home. Dalit’s Mother was there to watch and help.
From our formal lessons in birth education, we already knew what were integral needs for every delivering mother: the need for quiet and protected privacy, a sense of free choice concerning birthing postures (standing, sitting, walking, squatting), freedom to make sounds and perform physical gyrations and gestures. After all, the mother is now entering a condition of altered consciousness where intellectual activity is low and emotional and sensual awareness are working at full volume, just as nature intended. Any interruption of this altered awareness—such as a loud noise, bright lights, even an innocent question—forces the mother into the thinking part of her brain, where fear and doubt intrude and disturb dramatically the trancelike state necessary for a fully focused birth. We therefore made sure that the birthing chamber was quiet and dimly lit; that Dalit could be alone if she wished or with her mother and me if she wished; that she had the option to move around the room, remain sedentary, or lie down. Her needs were first on the list; her wishes were our commands.
Dalit slipped into the Jacuzzi, where for the next six hours she continued to dilate slowly under the warm, swirling water. The pulsing jets eased her entire body and reduced the pain of the contractions, also relaxing our child in utero. At the same time, the warm water helped the groin and abdominal muscles loosen and become flexible, preparing her for the intense pushing activity that would soon follow. Many studies have shown that fretful mothers experience a more difficult and painful delivery than women who are calm, open to joy and even ecstasy and centered. All those in attendance that day did everything in their power to ensure that Dalit was comfortable and anxiety free.
As the hours went by, the contractions built steadily, each one lasting approximately a minute. As they became more frequent and intense I did what I’d been taught to do in our training sessions. I coached my wife, holding my stopwatch, speaking to her in loving tones, talking her from beginning to end of the rising and falling spasms, each time using an image we had both chosen: the metaphoric depiction of waves washing in and breaking on the shore. Because our subconscious mind thinks in images, this primal view spoke directly to her body-mind at the deepest level.
“Here comes the next wave,” I said, as the contraction arrived. “Now we’re fifteen seconds into it. Hold on, here it comes, rolling in from the ocean . . . thirty seconds . . . it’s reaching its crest, we’re already halfway through, hold on . . . forty-five seconds, it’s crested now, almost at the end. . . . Now its sixty seconds, the wave has passed—we made it!” Then she relaxed in the swirling water and was pain free for several minutes until the next wave arrived. When the pain did come, Dalit reacted to it in whatever way seemed most appropriate: by groaning, laughing, howling. “The key for rediscovering the universal needs of women in labor,” writes Odent regarding a woman’s varied reactions to delivery, “is to interpret a phenomenon which is well-known to certain mothers and midwives who have experience of undisturbed birth. It is the fact that when a woman is giving birth by herself, without any medication, there is a time when she has an obvious tendency to cut herself off from the world, as if going to another planet. (In a book called Storey’s Guide to Raising Meat Goats, I learned that during the first parts of labor, goats gaze off into the faraway distance and are quite unreachable.) She dares to do what she would never dare to do in her daily social life; for example scream or swear. She can find herself in the most unexpected postures, making the most unexpected noises. This means that she is reducing the control by the neocortex in her brain [the thinking part of the mind]. This reduction of neocortical activity is the most important aspect of birth physiology from a practical point of view. Dalit continued this uninhibited letting-go for some time until her contractions began to come in rapid, regular succession. Finally, she felt the pressure of the baby’s head pushing through the birth canal and crowning. At this moment, she climbed out of the tub, and aided by the midwife and attendants, she settled herself into the birthing bed.
Here, in a minimum of pain and in a serene, candle-lit room with celestial music playing, surrounded by her loving husband, her mother, and friendly faces in an atmosphere of ineffable joy, within ten minutes the midwife and Sigrid had helped my wife bring our uncrying infant into this wide, bright world.
Who among us would not wish to be born in such a way?
Our First Taste of New Parenting
As our birth plan stated, I stood by Dalit’s side and held our new son in my hands as he emerged. I hugged his tiny, wet body to my chest in an epiphany of gratitude, amazement, and love. Then I placed him on my wife’s stomach and watched in a kind of ecstasy as instinctively he crawled his way up to the area of Dalit’s heart and placed his head over her left breast. Having been taught in advance about the “crawl reflex” that impels newborns to inch their way by themselves up to the breast, my wife was fully prepared. She guided our child’s mouth to her nipple, and he began to drink peacefully with his umbilical cord still attached. After ten minutes, when the cord stopped throbbing and the baby was breathing freely on his own, I cut the cord myself, then picked him up and hugged him again, gazing steadily into his eyes. (Despite the old wives’ tale that newborns have no vision, they are actually programmed to see at a distance of ten to twelve inches the moment they are born, a process that helps them bond with their new parents.) I then handed him to my wife’s mother, who made similar eye contact, and she then returned him to Dalit. Day One
