The Business of Being Born

I can't remember the exact moment when I, very pregnant with Science Boy (baby #1) six years ago, fled in frustration from the office of my OB and turned instead to the arms of a midwife and a midwifery practice specializing in out-of-hospital births. Maybe it had been a gradual process, when little by little, week after week, my appointment times with my OB were getting shorter and shorter and shorter. Maybe it had been abrupt, when during my last appointment, I found myself double-booked with another expecting mom. Maybe it was both -- the rushed nature of the whole thing, the feeling that my experience was so (hohum!) routine, that we had to keep to a schedule and the clock was ticking. I felt the lack of respect for me, my baby, the process.

So on my 36th week of pregnancy, I switched practices to an all-midwife freestanding birth center and promptly gave birth a week later. Maybe my body had been telling me something. Because somewhere along the way, I had made the transformation from one of those women who viewed birthing as a medical process--where epidurals, episiotomies and continual fetal monitoring were normal--to a natural one, an activity my body was built for, something I was born to do. Both my birth experiences, which had been drug- and intervention-free, had been positive, empowering, I-am-woman-hear-me-roar experiences.

But when I tried to tell other women what I'd felt, there was again this instinctive horror against what I'd gone through. How my birthing at a birth center was, despite a lack of reading and research on the part of the person I was talking to, inherently "unsafe." The "God forbid" factor was frequently invoked, as in, "God forbid something would have happened. What would you have done?"

For my second birth, I actually explored the possibility of birthing at home. Ultimately, because baby #2 had a very high chance of coming out severely jaundiced and would need to stay in a hospital anyway, we ended up birthing at a hospital. But the birth happened so fast (2.5 hours of labor from start to finish) that I wish I had gone through with my plans to have people come to ME instead of me going to them.

Home birthing and midwifery continues to be a controversial subject here in the U.S. despite the fact that it is widely practiced in Japan and Europe. We Americans are so indoctrinated on the idea that More Is Better when it comes to medical interventions that we've lost sight of how birth is inherently natural. We've accepted that epidurals are safe, that c-sections are routine, that a hospital is the ONLY place to give birth. If all that is true, then I ask you this: why then do we have the second highest infant-mortality rate in the developed world? Shouldn't we have the lowest?

Ricki Lake recently come out with a documentary in support of intervention-free births (she gave birth to her 2nd son at home and footage from the birth is shown in the movie). Here's a sneak peak for those of you interested:



The movement to take the birth experience back and away from the medical establishment has a long, long way to go. Perhaps we'll never think like our European and Japanese sisters. But the grassroots movement is there and I'm proud to be one of its members.