Conscious Labor and Delivery

Over the millennia, the control and overseeing of childbirth has always belonged to women. Traditionally, female relatives and female friends attend the birth, and a female midwife delivers the child. Delivery takes place in a woman’s bedroom or in a familiar domestic setting. In many instances a doula—a female helper—is part of the delivery team, performing nonclinical birthing chores, providing emotional support, and helping to talk mothers through the ebb and flow of labor. Based on eons of human experience, everyone agrees: in matters of childbirth, women know best.

It is the mother who invariably takes center stage during birth. It is from her body that the newborn child emerges; it is the mother who must go through the agonies and ecstasies of parturition. The first earthly form a newborn sees is the mother’s face. It is the mother who places her child to the breast and who gives this new little being succor for the first time. All the while, the child remains tied to the mother’s body via the umbilical cord, a palpable symbol of the mystical maternal attachment that will last a lifetime. From this perspective as well, the birthing chamber is and always has been the sanctuary of the female. For millions of years, the female psyche has been hard-wired with an understanding of what to do at birth and how to do it. Most women (though not all) appear to be born with an innate sense of how to cooperate with nature during pregnancy and birth and how to provide robust, loving nurture once their child is born.

By means of maternal instinct and by tangible faculties such as heightened senses, hormonal stimulation, chemical cues, intuitive body wisdom—and most of all, from thousands of years of genetic imprinting—a mother possesses all the tools necessary to birth her child. In her, the package is complete.

“Birth is a woman’s work,” insists Dr. Marshall Klaus of the American Society of Pediatricians. “When she has no female relatives or friends who feel comfortable supporting her, she needs a doula. When birth is truly normal this way everyone benefits—mothers, babies, fathers, and society.”

Since the beginning of time, this concept, that women are the gatekeepers and guardians of the childbearing realm, has been part of a society’s wisdom . . . in all societies, that is, except our own.

First, these concepts are readily understandable and easy to put into practice—far easier, it should be said, than the practices used in the conventional medical model. Second, practitioners of natural childbirth are privy to a vast array of new scientific knowledge that supports its approach to labor and delivery and that disproves a number of the supposedly inviolate principles on which the modern medical model of birthing is based. Also, the principles of natural childbirth hearken back to a wisdom that is ancient and forgotten: knowledge buried in the feminine collective memory that is crying out to be heard once again.

Finally, while this ancient inner voice calls continually to women on an intuitive level, new scientific data developed in labs and studies around the world helps us better understand the miraculous preprogrammed hormonal orchestration that takes place within a woman’s body during birth just as clearly as we understand other fundamental body processes such as digestion and respiration. This new data, much of which is unknown to the public at large and to parents-to-be, shows us how and why nature itself—as opposed to the medical intervention model— is the best of all birthing guides and teachers.

Today most women have abdicated trusting their intuition and the eons of birthing imprints that are collected in the collective memory. This is to a great extent because the support of women for all past generations has been the circle of grandmothers, mothers, sisters and aunts. Knowledge of the female domain was passed from one generation of women to the next. With the techno-medical takeover of birthing over the last seventy-five years this tradition of grandmother and mothers educating the young mother-to-be has all but vanished.

We present here the simple and understandable ‘facts of life’ about the biochemistry involved in conscious labor and delivery.

This is new data. Very much of which is unknown to the public at large, As well as to most parents-to-be. This data shows us how and why nature itself—as opposed to the medical intervention model—is the best of all birthing guides and teachers.

Before we discuss natural childbirth itself, let us look at aspects of this new science and, in the process, ask the following questions:

1. What are the fundamental biological processes of birth and how do they work?
2. What has science discovered in the past several decades concerning the physiology of birthing?
3. How does this new information support and buttress the concepts of the new parenting?

The Hormonal Orchestra at Work

The following information, based largely on the writings of Sarah J. Buckley, who explains how a mother’s preprogrammed chemical birthing blueprints are read spontaneously and deciphered during pregnancy, labor, and birth. It also demonstrates the fragility of these blueprints, explaining why interference with a mother’s natural biological engineering can sabotage the entire course of a birth, damaging both mother and child in the process.

One of the most critical aspects of this maternal biology, as explained by Buckley and others in the field, begins with hormones.

In a nutshell, hormones are protein telegrams that carry chemical messages and instructions in the blood, telling certain organs of the body what to do and when to do it. During childbirth the primary hormones responsible for activating and controlling all other hormone systems are the basic sex hormones: progesterone and estrogen.

While pregnant, the amount of progesterone produced in the placenta increases ten to eighteen times. Estrogen levels rise more than a thousand times. These two primary chemical activators, progesterone and estrogen, are in turn responsible for mobilizing the so-called four major birth hormone groups, which control the detailed chemical interactions that take place during labor and birth. When permitted to function on their own without external interference, these hormone groups perform a majority of the work necessary for a successful delivery:

The role of the brain as director of the birth process:

These four hormone groups—inducing love, transcendence, stimulation, and mothering—are all produced in the limbic system, that part of the brain from which our emotions come.

Love Hormone

Oxytocin: a pituitary-mediated hormone that causes uterine contractions in women, increases sexual desire, and produces the ejection of breast milk, sometimes known as the “hormone of love”

Transcendence Hormone

Beta-endorphin: a hormone that induces pleasure, a sense of well-being, natural analgesic qualities, and feelings of emotional transcendence during birth.

Stimulation Hormone

Adrenalin group: a hormone excreted from the adrenal glands that increases metabolism and other stimulating chemicals in the blood of both mother and child

Mothering Hormone

Prolactin: a hormone that stimulates breast milk and lactation in new mothers

During labor they build to a critical mass, peak at birth, then reintegrate into the mother and child’s systems in the post-birth hours and days that follow. Once birth and the time after are completed, these substances, having served their purpose, return to normal levels within the blood. All parts work like integrated and perfectly balanced instruments playing together in a symphony orchestra. Mammalian animals of every kind have followed this blueprint without any type of assistance since the beginning of time. Spontaneous labor in a normal woman is an event marked by a number of processes so complicated and attuned so perfectly to each other that any interference will only detract from their optimal character. The only thing required from the bystanders is that they show respect for this awe-inspiring process by complying with the first rule of medicine: nil nocere, “do not harm.”

Disrupting the balance

What happens though if this hormonal dance, so complete on its own and so independent of any need for human help, is interrupted? When such disturbances take place, the hormones turn against the mother, in a manner of speaking, producing a dysfunction in the labor process.

When such dysfunction is triggered by a medical intervention, which is usually the case, this often makes another medical procedure necessary to right the wrong caused by the first intervention. Sometimes another procedure must then be performed to keep the spiral of chemical imbalance in check, eventually creating layer upon layer of dysfunction in a chemical system that is engineered by nature to handle the labor and delivery process entirely without outside help.

This already confused process is thrown into further imbalance by distractions in the hospital environment itself: bright lights, loud noises, surrounding machinery, the mother’s mental anguish that has been churned up by fears implanted in her mind. All these jarring factors add to the further disarray that takes place within the mother’s hormonal equilibrium. The irony of all this uncalled for tinkering, moreover, is that after medical methods have thrown off the working of a mother’s internal chemistry and the application of further interventions to repair the problems caused by these methods, mothers end up enduring an unnecessarily prolonged, frightful and painful delivery, then, absurdly—and commonly—coming away from the process feeling gratitude toward the medical establishment for being “saved.”

In her book Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom, Christiane Northrup, M.D., writes; “Many women describe birth in natural settings as erotic. Ina Mae Gaskin, in her classic, Spiritual Midwifery, writes that women need to be loved in labor, to be treated like Goddesses.”

Northrup makes the sage point that the birth of a baby consummates the prior acts of intercourse, conception, and gestation that initiated and nurtured the final birthing process. With the birth of the baby, the circle of life is now brought around fully. Northrup tells that after delivery some mothers choose to present the baby formally to the father as a sign that the cycle of creation has come full circle and is now complete.