Why Have a Natural Birth
An Ecofeminist Perspective on Natural Birth
Umedicated Birth - the intellectual way
Many families planning a natural childbirth do so in order to avoid the risks and side effects of medical interventions, including pain medications. The challenges of going without an epidural may seem like the lesser of two evils, so to speak, due to the lower risks of natural birth. Even if though this perspective is about what folks don’t want, this is not a bad place to start!
Evidence Based Birth offers terrific information about various medical interventions, their risks and benefits. Here’s an article specifically about epidurals. If you’re looking for a book chock full of information to help you decide what is important to you, develop your birthing plan, and even calm your relatives by spouting the research, I like The Thinking Woman’s Guide to a Better Birth, by Henci Goer. For a simple and clear discussion of some of the benefits of natural birth, try this article. And to prepare to go unmedicated, many childbirth educator offer classes including or specifically focused on alternative pain relief and comfort measures. I list a few of them here, in my resources section.
All that said, there are more reasons beyond risk mitigation to commit to having a natural birth. And there is more to a natural birth experience than avoiding pain and interventions.
Embodied Wisdom
Women’s bodies give us unique opportunities to hear the truth of our physical reality and the physical dimension of our universe. It is through the physicality of our experience that the Earth speaks to us. Our most primal, powerful, vulnerable, pleasurable, and painful moments gift us invaluable insight. What can our bodies teach us about how to be human? How to be in relationship? How to live in beauty with all beings on our planet? Are we willing to listen? Are we willing to treasure our bodies and our experiences the way we treasure our babies? Can we truly internalize the fact that our bodies are vessels for love, pleasure, and life? That our feelings matter? That self-love isn’t selfish? Natural birth, breastfeeding, and the postpartum period are truly crucibles for channeling this wisdom.
A Social Experience
For those of us who traverse monthly menstrual cycles, we already possess embodied experience with the interconnections of hormones, emotions, and relationships. We know that just being around other women can change the timing of our monthly flow. We know our libido, how we relate to our partners, and even how we see ourselves in the mirror changes when we’re fertile. It is no wonder to us that feeling safe, honored, and respected can actually translate into a safer birth for our babies, and of course for us. You can learn more about oxytocin, the love hormone, here.
A Cosmic Link
Our cycles, like the tides, the flow of water on this planet, are connected with the waxing and the waning of the moon. And isn’t there something cosmic about being the vessel for a new soul to incarnate in our physical reality?
Once, while making love during a fertile time in my cycle, I saw the planets lining up in the cosmos, looking down at me, asking, “Well?” I have never felt so simultaneously vulnerable and also powerful - aside from giving birth, of course. Our bodies are the vessel for all of this - the earth, the waters, the planets, our sisters and brothers and the next generation. We are partners in Creation. Our moments of greatest power often come alongside great vulnerability, great pleasure, great pain. To open to the co-creative power that flows through us, with awareness, intention, gratitude, and humility, is one of life’s greatest adventures - a gift we simultaneously receive and give where the lines between one individual and another, life and not life, are blurred and transformed. Everything about having a baby is simultaneously deeply embodied and all-the-way-out-there spiritual.
Interdependence
For many women, becoming pregnant is one of the most primal, nature-connecting and simultaneously spiritual experiences we ever have. At the same time, being pregnant and postpartum also puts us in a position of dependence that may be entirely unfamiliar. There is no denying the intense physicality of the experience, from morning sickness, to food cravings, to carrying around the added weight of a baby, placenta, amniotic fluid, bigger breasts, and the reserves we build to support a second life (and maybe a third being, too!) and resource us for the postpartum period. After baby comes Earth side, the raw, physical nature of mothering continues. Fluid leaks from every orifice of mama and baby. Baby requires near constant physical contact. Needs for nourishment, hydration, and rest increase and continue. As baby grows, we carry them around everywhere, feed them from our bodies, then chase them, mash food for them, bend over to clean up messes, run twice as many loads of laundry, try to find time for ourselves to sleep, exercise, interact with other adults, catch our breath.
For me, many of the physical challenges I have experienced have been “challenge by choice.” I’ve played sports and trained in martial arts, run up every escalator when riding the DC metro, lived in a tent for three months. But early motherhood was really, really hard for me. I thought I was a strong, fit, badass, independent, natural-living woman. Motherhood, in particular the postpartum period, opened up for me my utter dependence. Any illusions of independence melted away. I needed my husband. My husband needed the farm where he worked. We needed rain. To be honest, the farm was an educational non-profit endeavor. But my state of being impressed upon me the meaning of true dependence and revealed, at least a little bit, what that means for farming families. Even though natural birth, home birth, breastfeeding, no electric swing, no stroller, cloth diapers, elimination communication, farming and all our other natural lifestyle choices represented, to some extent, challenge by choice and nature connection by choice, they still taught me so much by opening up the feelings of being totally interconnected and totally dependent, on a raw, physical level.
Learning Self Love
Because many of my needs went unmet during my postpartum and early motherhood journeys, I also learned how conditional my self-love was. I loved my bad-assness. I loved my strength and competence. I loved certain things about myself because I had “earned” my own respect. And now, while loving my sweet, magical, new, vulnerable, little human being unconditionally, with all of my being, I had to ask for everything. And deep down, totally unconsciously, I didn’t feel that I deserved to have what I needed. In reality, nothing much had changed. Had I ever truly provided for all of my own needs? But now, for the first time, I understood interdependence. I understood vulnerability. I understood that caring for myself and caring for another and being cared for by others are all one and the same.
When we are willing to forgo medications and technologies designed to protect us from the physical challenges and sensations that we fear, we open ourselves as individuals and collectives to the need for community and nature connection. We actually feel our loved ones to be part of our lives in a much deeper and more primal way. We feel our need to listen to the earth. Otherwise, we are listening to the forces of empire. We’re listening to technology. We’re listening to our minds, our brains in our heads. We don’t really tune into the importance of the heart and the body as sources of wisdom for humans regarding how to act on earth and towards other humans and non-human beings. Just the acts of giving birth naturally, allowing ourselves to feel what we feel, breastfeeding, and experiencing the tenderness of the postpartum period, show us what needs to be rearranged in our world. When we open up to the wisdom that we hold, starting in the physical, moving through the heart, and then informing our minds, we can begin to understand what we need from our partners, families, communities and societies, and thus how our world might be a better place.
Co-Empowerment
It took about 15 years for me to fully own that the pivot point for changing and rearranging the world around me, especially when it comes to my needs being met as a mother, lives inside of me. Can I truly value myself enough to ask for what I need from a place of knowing that I am inherently and unconditionally deserving of receiving? Ironically, counter-intuitively, true self-love requires deep humility. True self-love is no different from loving a baby or loving the earth. True self-love is no different from the ultimate surrender of self to all of Creation/Creator. True self-love is allowing ourselves to feel and believing that the messages we receive through our deep and intense feeling are vital messages for our world. True self-love is acknowledging the value of leading from the birth pool or the bed, where we roar and birth our babies and then lie down to nurse and be fed, hold and be held.
My pregnancies, births, and postpartum periods taught me these lessons - that self-love for a mother isn’t selfish but rather selfless, that being heard by another requires me to hear and believe myself first, that total surrender into the utter softness and vulnerability of the archetypal feminine polarity of my being opens me and my husband and our world to the greatest power, the greatest pleasure, and the greatest pain, all at the same time. That it takes more courage to be soft than to be strong. Our power lies here. When we value the experience of opening to the unknown and allowing our bodies to be vessels for truth, our world changes miraculously around us for the better. This is activism. This is radical. This is beauty.
Better than Better Safe than Sorry
In the US, our health care system is set up to minimize risk through screening, monitoring, and applying policies based on numerical findings. Too often these policies conflict with natural birth plans and even the evidence on what is safe and ideal for the mama and baby. For example, on the labor and delivery unit, nurses are required to monitor laboring people’s blood pressure and babies’ heart rates at certain intervals, even if they interfere with sleep, freedom of movement, going to the bathroom, taking a shower, and so on. Induction of labor based on estimated due dates is a whole other ball of wax. Families planning to go medication free educate themselves on the stages of labor, Spinning babies techniques, and natural comfort measures and enter the labor and delivery ward armed with birthing plans and birthing balls, prepared to advocate for their wishes to be respected.
But as Whapio, one of my wise midwifery mentors, likes to say, “we can do better than better safe than sorry.” Homebirth midwives provide an alternative to hospital birth that is more aligned with the evidence, significantly because we can actually offer individualized care.
Looking for a doula or midwife in the Baltimore area?
If you are planning a natural birth and you live in the Baltimore area, I would be delighted to serve as a part of your care team. Wondering if you are a good candidate for homebirth? Lets talk! You can set up a free consult here and read more about my homebirth midwifery services here. Unfortunately, Maryland is no longer home to any free-standing birth centers. For parents considered as high risk pregnancies, I also attend hospital births.
Frequently Asked Questions
How painful is natural labor?
Natural labor may bring some of the most intense physical sensations you’ve ever experienced. But there is time in between contractions, and the peak of each contraction last for a very short time. Hypnosis, massage, hydrotherapy, feelings of safety, and pleasurable sensations can all mitigate the pain and even transform your experience into one of transcendence and triumph.
How can I prepare for birth without epidural?
Here are a few ideas.
Establish a regular practice of deep breathing and relaxation, perhaps with the aid of music or guided visualizations, and apply your practice while holding ice or doing wall sits for a minute at a time.
Learn about optimal fetal positioning, practice spinning babies techniques and release, and see a chiropractor or craniosacral therapist to help your body and baby achieve ideal alignment and open the path of least resistance for birth.
Take a childbirth class to learn comfort measures and labor support techniques your partner can use.
Hire a doula.
Is natural birth better for your body?
It can be! Pain medications can be quite hard on the body and always come with potential side effects and reactions. When you can feel everything, you can listen to your body’s signals to move, urinate, etc. You are more free to drink, move, eat, pee, and sleep when you aren’t hooked up to the monitoring devices and in/out tubes required with epidural anesthesia.
Why do I touch myself during labor?
Self-pleasuring can help release oxytocin during labor, which helps increase the strength and efficacy of contractions while promoting relaxation and reducing pain. All the same parts are involved in sex as in birth, and the same hormones and feelings can be present, too, not to mention the same individuals!
