Healing Birth, Healing the Earth
Sarah J. Buckley
March 2002
This article was most recently published in Byron Child
Issue 3, Sept 2002 www.byronchild.com
Sarahjbuckley@uqconnect.net

Birth, She is dying.

This primal and unspeakably powerful initiation, the only road to motherhood for our ancestors, has been stripped of Her dignity and purpose in our times. Birth has become a dangerous medical disease to be treated with escalating levels, and types, of technological interventions.

What is worse, perhaps, is that the ecstasy of Birth- Her capacity to take us outside (ec) our usual state (stasis)- has been forgotten, and we are entering the sacred domain of motherhood post-operatively, even post-traumatically, rather than transformationally.

These deviations from the natural order, whose lore is genetically encoded in our bodies, have enormous repercussions.

We live in a society where new mothers have unprecedented levels of distress and depression. Where our babies, with their colic, reflux, and ‘sleep problems’, are also having their distress medically treated. Where, depression and anxiety are among the largest burdens of disease worldwide, according to the World Health Organisation, and where children as young as 4 are being diagnosed with these conditions. And where our young people, at the prime of their lives, are choosing in large numbers to opt out, with mind-altering drugs, or to opt out permanently through suicide.

More than this, we have set ourselves as a species on the road to self-destruction through our despoiling of our collective mother, the Earth. The havoc that we wreak through waste and greed has many parallels with our treatment of mothers and babies, and our primal environment, which is our mother’s womb.

And just as we have pitted ourselves against the Earth, forgetting that we are interdependent, so too have we begun to pit the ‘rights of the baby’ against the ‘rights of the mother’, imagining a separation, a competition, that does not and cannot exist.

The wounds of Birth and of the Earth are severe. But as the Goddess Hygieia tells us, “The wound reveals the cure”. My belief is that we are suffering in birth from lack of passion, of love, of surrender and of a misunderstanding of our own power, and that these qualities can provide us with a way of healing birth, and, at the same time, healing the earth.

PASSION

We all began our lives in a passionate act. Our human bodies crave the intensity and pleasure that sex brings, and many cultures have recognised the capacity for healing that is inherent in the sexual act. Why is sex so powerful? As well as giving us the potential to create new life- the ultimate power- sex involves peak experiences, and peak hormone levels, of love, pleasure and excitement. These hormones- the body’s chemical messengers- and their actions are exactly the same as those of birth.

In other words, giving birth is, inherently and hormonally, a passionate and sexual act. From the perspective of hormone levels in both mother and baby, we could say that it is the most passionate experience that we will ever have.

Oxytocin, the hormone of love, builds up during labour, reaching peak levels at the moment of birth, creating loving, altruistic feelings between mother and baby. Endorphins, hormones of pleasure and transcendence, also peak at birth, as do the fight-or-flight, or excitement hormones adrenalin and nor-adrenaline, (epinephrine and norepinephrine) which, as well as protecting the baby from lack of oxygen in the final stages of birth, ensure that mother and baby are both wide-eyed and alert at first contact. Prolactin, the mothering hormone, helps us to surrender to our babies, giving us the tenderest of maternal feelings as our reward.

But these passionate hormones are not just feel-good add-ons. They actually orchestrate the processes of birth (and sex) and enhance efficiency, safety and ease for both mother and baby, and their crescendo at birth is, in other species (all mammals share the same hormones) a necessary pre-requisite in switching on instinctive mothering behaviours. Furthermore, this hormonal cocktail rewards birthing mothers with the experience of ecstasy and fulfilment, making us want to give birth again and again.

Not that birthing passionately means birthing painlessly. Giving birth is a huge event, emotionally and physically, and will make demands on the body equivalent to, for example, running a marathon. But when a woman feels confident in her body, well supported, and able to express herself without inhibition, the pain becomes just one part of the process, and something that she can respond to instinctively with resources such as breath, sound and movement.

The problem in our times is that the passion of birth is not recognised, nor allowed for. Thus birth has become a dispassionate, medical event, usually occurring in a setting that discourages emotional _expression. If we are to reclaim our birthing passion, we must firstly give ourselves permission to birth passionately, and choose a birth setting and birth attendants with this in mind. It is likely that our birth in these circumstances will be easier, helping us to step into new motherhood gently and gracefully.

Passion is, to my mind, an opposite, and an antidote, for despair and depression. This is clear physiologically and hormonally. If we give birth, and are born, in passion, how different would our primal emotional imprint be? And what about our brain chemistry, which is being set even as we are born? . Some studies have linked exposure to drugs and procedures at birth with an increased risk of drug addiction, suicide and anti-social behaviour in later life, and other commentators have suggested that contemporary problems such as learning disorders and ADHD may also be linked to drugs and interventions at birth.

As a birthing mother, I have both seen and experienced the enormous passion that can be unleashed at birth, and which can fuel both passionate motherhood and a lifetime’s work on behalf of mothers, babies and the earth, and I ask:

Can we afford, as a species, to be born, and to give birth dispassionately?

LOVE

Passion and love are as powerful a combination at birth as they are in sexual activity. And in birth, as in sex, we release oxytocin, the hormone of love, in huge quantities. Here again, our hormones are directing us toward optimal and ecstatic experiences, yet this system is also vulnerable to interference.

For example, a labouring woman’s production of oxytocin is drastically reduced by the use of epidural pain relief- this is the reason why epidurals prolong labour. And even when an epidural has ‘worn off’, her oxytocin peak, which causes the powerful final contractions that are designed to birth her baby quickly and easily, will be still be significantly lessened- and she is more likely to have her baby pulled out with forceps, as a result.

The drug syntocinon, which has been called the most abused drug in obstetrics, is also implicated. It is a synthetic form of the hormone oxytocin, and is used for induction and for augmentation (or acceleration) of labour; almost half of women giving birth in Australia at present receive large doses of this drug in labour for one of these reasons.

When a labouring woman has syntocinon administered by drip, for induction or augmentation, her body will detect high levels of this drug in the bloodstream and her brain will respond by cutting down the release of her own oxytocin. We know that women in this situation are vulnerable to haemorrhage after birth because of this, and even more syntocinon becomes necessary to counter that risk. However, we do not know the psychological effects of giving birth without the peak levels of oxytocin that nature prescribes for all mammals.

French surgeon and natural birth pioneer Michel Odent believes that when a baby initiates his own birth, he may be training himself to secrete his own hormone of love. Odent also notes our society’s deficits in our capacity to love self and others, and he traces these problems back to the time around birth, and especially to interference with the oxytocin system.

I had a very powerful experience of oxytocin as the hormone of love while labouring with my fourth baby, Maia Rose. As the waves of labour strengthened, I found myself looking into the eyes of my beloved, telling him “I love you, I love you, I love you…” peaking and subsiding with each wave. This ecstatic experience has created more love in my heart, in our relationship and in our family, and has taught me, in a very physical way, that giving birth is also making love.

SURRENDER

Surrender is not a popular virtue. In fact, surrender is seen as a weakness in our culture, where we are universally encouraged to be active and in control of our lives. This very yang, or masculine attitude, may serve us in some circumstances, but we cannot birth our babies through sheer force of will, and we need to learn the more subtle- yet equally powerful- path of surrender.

I sense that, for modern women, difficulty with surrender can reflect a lack of confidence in our bodies. This is not suprising, when our society is distrustful of the natural order in general, and women’s bodies in particular. This view is further reinforced by the obstetric model, with its long lists of all that can possibly go wrong with our birthing bodies, and its myriad of technological fixes to rescue us from even the remotest possibility of danger.

Along with this forgetting of the awesome but natural power of our female bodies, we have also lost our birthing Goddesses and Saints, who have, for millennia, guided women through this transition, where the veil between life and death is at its thinnest. Today, this guidance is available to us, when and if we need it, in the living form of a midwife: a woman who has pledged to be with (mid) women (wyfe) in birth. A good midwife can remind us by her presence that we carry genetically the birthing successes of all our foremothers, and that we know already how to give birth.

As midwife and author Jeannine Parvati Baker reminds us, giving birth is women's spiritual practice, requiring "purity in strength, flexibility, health, concentration, surrender and faith." (Prenatal Yoga and Natural Childbirth- see below). It is also said that to be consciously present at birth is equivalent to seven years of meditation. When we birth consciously, putting our great rational mind on hold, and allowing our instinctive nature to dominate, we can access the wisdom that all spiritual traditions teach: that the ego is our servant, not our mistress, and that our path to ecstasy and enlightenment involves surrendering our egoic notions of control. This level of surrender will also serve us well in our many years of motherhood.

When we surrender conscious control, we also allow our deeper innate rhythms to surface: this can be a profound experience for a birthing woman. In allowing her labour to go at its own pace, without hurry or interference, a woman learns to trust her own, and her baby’s, natural rhythms. Such trust is another gift, another way in which nature ensures optimal mothering, and enhanced survival, for our young.

In surrendering to birth, we also learn about our role on the earth: we are not the rulers, nor the architects, of creation. Life comes through us, simply and gracefully, when we allow it.

POWER

It is easy to say that our problems in birth stem from the excessive power of the medical system and its agents, and a lack of power by the birthing woman. However a deeper analysis is necessary, I believe, because the time has come to dispel this idea of a power imbalance and to assert our innate authority in birthing.

We live in a culture that prizes, and puts its faith in, technology. We reward those, such as doctors, who are masters of technology, and indeed, we are fortunate to have their skills available to us when we need them. And even though we may want less technology in ‘normal birth’, we are witnessing more and more litigation against obstetricians, almost all of which blames them for not using enough technology.

Along with technology, we also prize information. In pregnancy and birth, becoming ‘informed’ is equated with being ‘responsible’, both of which are strongly encouraged culturally, yet there is also a price to pay. We can have all of the information in the world, but we cannot predict our experiences in birth. And we diminish our own authority in birthing and in mothering – we disempower ourselves- when we put more faith in information from the outside (tests, scans, other’s opinions) than our own internal knowing of our bodies and our babies.

The truth is that our babies are constantly ‘informing’ us of their needs and desires, and how we can best care for them. This is a physiological reality- the placenta is continual communication with our bodies, transferring blood and nutrients and organising, via the placental hormones, our bodies and our psyches for the optimal and specific mothering that this baby requires. In the same way, our cravings, yearnings, dreams and inclinations in pregnancy can be communications from our babies, and show us the deeper ways of knowing that are richer and more true, even if less numerical or detailed, than information from the outside such as medical tests.

In fact, from the very beginning, when we first suspect that we are creating new life in our womb, we can use this ancient ‘system’, and allow our bodies, rather than a technological test, to inform us. Often, the truth of our bodies will unfold gradually, allowing us the space to learn and adapt at our own pace and giving us opportunities for reflection and dreaming.

When we choose this traditional women’s path, the path of all our foremothers, we discover, and reinforce, an inalienable trust and power in ourselves and our female bodies. This deep faith is the best preparation possible for birth, and is also, to my mind, is the basis of true responsibility- we are able to respond with our own truth. We also become able to use the medical system, if we choose, without giving away our power.

Beyond this, when we tap into women’s ways of knowing, we open channels of communication with our babies, enhancing the psychic powers of communication that nature intends for mothers of all species. Mothering can become a meditation, a deep mindfulness that is satisfying spiritually as well as physically and emotionally: again, I believe that this is nature’s intent, and a possibility for all of us.

How would it be to live in a society where we are all, through giving birth or being birthed, in possession of our own power and our deep knowing? Where science and technology are our tools, rather than our masters? How differently would we treat our babies? How differently would we treat each other? How differently would we treat the earth?

Birth is dying, but, like cells in Her body, we each have the power to enliven Her and to resurrect Her in all Her glory. What is needed, I believe, is the collective passion, love, surrender and power that we pour into the ether as we birth our babies.

And in healing birth, we are healing our Selves, our babies and the Earth.

With thanks to Jeannine Parvati Baker for many core ideas and phrases; ecstasy in birth, 'healing the earth, healing birth': 'giving birth is women's spiritual practice' (from Prenatal Yoga and Natural Childbirth, Silver Anniversary Edition, Freestone Publishing, 2000) and 'the wound reveals the cure', which is the canon of her Mystery School, Hygieia College. Thanks also, for inspiration and ideas, to Leilah McCracken, Michel Odent , and Shivam Rachana and the International College of Spiritual Midwifery.

Sarah Buckley is a Brisbane-based GP, writer and mother of 4 home-born children.

She is a foundation member of the International College of Spiritual Midwifery. Her writing is also available on the ICSM and Birthlove websites, as above.

Dear Jeannine, I really feel that my work, too, is to fill a need. I can no more transform that c-section for that (or any) mom with soft words. Nor can I transform her SUV, or McMansion, or Happy Meal/Vaccinated/Circumcised child into something else. I am not the paid confessional figure for mom's who need to have a guilt free medication trip.... I have heard rumor of vanity C-secs. combined with tummy tucks, now that's some real one stop shopping. Hey if corporate America got its way, we woman could be delivered at Costco. Jenny Shotts Portland, OR www.hipwatermama.com And Jeannine's Response to Jenny; Wonderful -- you are not an epi-doula." McMansion" and "Happy Meal", indeed. Methinks that the corpoRATS are already working on this idea: Drive Through Deliveries (DTD). You write like a cross between Mark Twain and Barbara Ehrenreich. Do you know that several of Hygieia College grads are now authors in their own right? I will prophesize the same for you. Your writings deserve a wider audience. So Jenny, keep your bright focus on the big picture. You got it already. Then notice how that big picture keeps on getting bigger. I can hardly wait to hear what you will envision to heal the Earth by healing Birth. LOVE, JP

My friend and colleague, Mary Kroeger, gifted me with a subscription to the magazine Midwifery Today, just in time to read their review of Prenatal Yoga. The magazine is so inspiring that I wrote a long letter to the Editor, posted below for your edification.

Dear Editor,

I inhaled your new Winter Issue No. 64, a fresh breath of truth in a world suffocating from the absent simplicity of natural birth. I loved reading about my friend Verena Schmidt, a rising star on the firmament of the homebirth renaissance. Did you know that she was the first student from Italy to enroll in Hygieia College many years ago?

I also celebrate Gloria Lemay's gracious letter announcing her release from prison. Her focus was on how her incarceration served the birthing community and expresses an authentic midwifery - what a lovely, soft and gentle letter she wrote. Thanks Gloria for reminding us that midwifery has many levels and can be done even from prison.

Another teacher of midwifery, Nan Koehler, faces prison at this time. A granny midwife in California, with statistics for over a thousand births that rival any practitioner’s track record, faces criminal charges. Please visit the website friendsofnan.org for more information. Grateful am I to your magazine for keeping midwives current with our legal reality.

Sarah Buckley, as always, has written a magnificent article on Ultrasound. I have concerned myself about this diagnostic procedure ever since it was invented so Sarah has given me the evidence to educate others about the potential risks. Thank you, Dr Buckley!

There was so much that I liked about this new issue that knowing where else to throw the accolades was a tough choice. Yet let me now begin with you, dear Editor.

Thank you Jan again and again for your courageous editorial. I wonder if you got any flack from midwives who are not Christian? A heads up, my friend - Your declaration that midwives are God's chosen people may draw the fire from those who perceive the Crusades of Christianity as another name for the witchhunt of midwives.

I believe that Christ's message is that we are all God's chosen people. I may not have scriptures to back this up, do you? Whenever any group organizes itself around the idea of being special or better than another, it is a sure way to set up a polemic.

This is why I appreciate reading your oft quoted statement so much, "... if we treat each other as well as we treat our pregnant women, unity would be achieved immediately".

This realization came to me when I lived in a spiritual community with a beloved teacher. The members would pour out adoration to him, even following him all the way to his ride to and from the meeting for that one more glimpse of our teacher. We were utterly devoted to him.

One day when we were waving goodbye to our teacher, my friend turned to me and said that we would know that our spiritual practice was really working when we treated one another in the same way we did our teacher.

It is with this mind that I suggest that we consider that if God chose midwives, God also chose mothers, babies, fathers, medwives, CNN's, and doctors, too.

Jan, you bring up the charged topic of judgment in your editorial. The way I approach "judgment" in all life, including the varied styles of midwifery practice, is to stop judging judgment and embrace this as a way to investigate my own mind.

I used to judge myself for judging, and that was quite a conundrum! Now I recognize that when I am judging, I have an invitation to explore my beliefs more deeply.

Whenever I am in judgment, I look within to see how that judgment serves. If I continue to ask how this judgment serves not only me (to make me feel better), but how it serves the Earth, eventually I run out of ways that it possibly can serve.

Then I can reclaim my judgment as a projection and there is no need to forgive. Everyone is doing the best they can, from within their own belief system or worldview. I understand the source of the judgment from within myself and can correct my own erroneous thinking. Indeed, no one else can.

I perceive that it's problematic to think that unity means being the same. Rather the ideal of unity, as you suggest, is more easily actualized through our political work as harmony.

How can you have a symphony if every instrument played the same note? How can a bio-region be sustained without eco-diversity? How can we serve birth if all of us practiced midwifery in the same style?

With that said, I will now address Robbie Davis-Floyd's statement that we cease using terms of differentiation about styles of midwifery. I respectfully disagree: I think that it is vital in order to sustain a midwifery practice that not only survives, but evolves, that we do have precise distinctions.

What I hear as a pioneer in the freebirth community for these last 25 years is that many mothers choose unassisted birth because of betrayal - they thought they had hired a midwife, to be surprised when an obstetric model of management was applied when feeling most vulnerable.

A way to clear the road to a freebirth is by choosing this style for positive reasons, not because of suspicion about midwives. Ina May addresses this point in her excellent article on Unity.

Let us call a spade a spade. A midwife is different than a medwife, a CNM and an OB. One is not however better than another. Each way is necessary for the Earth or it wouldn't be happening. I respect my sister medwives, CNN's and OB practitioners for each of us has been called by birth to heal the Earth.

With that said, I now challenge Henci Goer to be consistent. She brilliantly deconstructs the AMA's conspiracy to distort the truth about homebirth in a previous issue of MT, yet in her letter to the Editor, then cites one of their faulty studies without applying the same parameters of judgment she did to the AMA's conspiracy against midwives?

Those studies allegedly demonstrating unassisted birth to be riskier are remarkably dated. Both come from states in the USA where the poverty level impacts maternal/fetal health. There is no comparison with planned (that is prepared and chosen) freebirth with those births that just happened with no one around.

Midwives who are working in the freebirth community the last 25 years however have a different story than what was reported in the JAMA and JPH medical publications that Henci cited. Many families choosing unassisted birth are highly educated, responsible, and are a far cry from a birth that is unattended for reasons of poverty, distrust in medical attendants, or ignorance.

Midwifery Today has published several articles on freebirth and in this recent winter issue, Linda Hessel contributes a most articulate essay, More About Unassisted Birth. These stories from the informed freebirth community will help midwives to better serve our evolving culture.

Back to Ms Goer -The possible complications that Henci lists about the inherent dangers of childbirth are presented in a medical format and from that worldview - umbilical cord prolapse, shoulder dystocia, hemorrhage or neonate apnea. She is using the same scare tactics the AMA uses. How do we serve two Masters?

Henci then states that these complications "can be handled by a skilled pair of hands and the use of simple medical equipment or medications". How does she know this to be true? It seems that the ubiquitous obstetrical litigation and expensive malpractice insurance would prove otherwise.

Midwives can respond to these complications and many more. Likewise, parents can learn how to respond appropriately. Indeed, in the freebirth community, fears about possible complications are explored in the prenatal period and transformed into the power to give spontaneous birth.

In this last quarter of a century that I have been writing and speaking about freebirth, I have noticed a big shift. More people realize that they have been traumatized by the medical management of birth and are looking for alternatives.

As Laura Shanley has always said, unassisted birth is not something we push on people: It is just one of many birth options. Giving the full range of birth options to families will keep us evolving as midwives.

However, identifying with the aggressor against homebirth, the AMA, and using their studies to prove one of the birth options is more dangerous than another, is not evidence based and therefore a disservice to birth.

Families are smart. They don't like being lied to by doctors or midwives. As midwives, let us be honest about how we practice and not pretend to be "Traditional Birth Attendants" if we actually do use obstetrical instruments and medications at times we judge them to be indicated.

Let us stop using fear based myths to dissuade families from exploring all of their birth options. Some midwives think that the risks outweigh the benefits to freebirth. That is a judgement that stands unsubstantiated yet if any midwife declares this, I believe her. For her, a freebirth would be risky, but not necessarily more risky for the family.

Having personally had births in hospital with an OB, at home with a doctor and a midwife, and also three freebirths, I know that for me, the "risks" were far surpassed by the benefits. Emphasis is on, for me. I confess, yet do not prescribe - for in the words of Artemis, "Birth is as safe as life gets".

To misinform parents in order to reassure them that your presence as midwife will make the birth safer is treacherous ground to tread. No one can declare this with absolute knowledge that it is true.

When push comes to shove, our integrity as midwives is strengthened by diversity and truthful declarations to the families that we serve. Yes, we are all "with woman" when we attend births, and yet, only some of us are midwives.

Let me close with a quote from Dr Mendelsohn that Gloria Lemay sent to me.

"An expectant mother should thank Providence for her good fortune if she has her baby in a taxicab on the way to the hospital. The cab driver may not be much help, but at least he will spare her from all of the purposeless, perilous, and unpleasant intervention her obstetrician had planned to inflict on her. If the new mother has her wits about her she’ll ask the driver to wait, have the cord cut in the hospital emergency room, and get back in the cab and take her baby home. Ideally, she shouldn’t have been in the cab in the first place, because the safest place for a healthy mother to have her baby is not in a hospital, but at home. After working in hospitals for most of my life, I can assure you that they are the dirtiest and most deadly places in town."
Dr. Robert Mendelsohn, from his book "MALe PRACTICE"

Blessed Be & Blessed Do,
Jeannine Parvati Baker

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ANTS
Update June 12 2002

Several times I've heard the expression, "We have an ant problem". Perhaps it would help to step out of the control-conflict model and take a different perspective. The ants come into my kitchen to help. It's late winter, almost spring. I almost don’t care any more about housework. I'm tired of being indoors. I want to go outside and get very active again.

My friends, the ants, step in and help clean up those spills on my counter. They remind me that the natural world around me is tuned in and receptive to my being. They remind me that even when I don't feel like it, stuff must be kept up. They remind me that work done with and for others is how this place expresses life-force.

They remind me that nature did not intend for me to have to do it all myself. They remind me that my relationship to them reflects my way of relating to all beings.

Do I need to dominate? Am I able and willing to surrender, share, and co-operate?

They remind me of the Hopi cosmology, when the Ant People sheltered and fed us. They remind me of the women of Bali, who bring a plate of food for "the spirits" to the outside of the house compound, where the ants feast and give thanks, and stay out of the houses!! Dig?

By Laughing Waters
Hygieia Student
Williams, OR

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July, Antigua Guatemala -- Que alegria. I am here. After one month I can finally roll an r (sometimes) and am glimpsing the 'ahhh' blessed sigh of yet another newly found 'familiar' emerging from this odd devotion to chaos. The air here in Antigua, under the Volcanos "Agua and Fuego" (water and fire) has a soft and uncatchable intelligence, dancing between hot and cold each day and sliding slyly under the gates into the old colonial homes.When I am invited or can dream myself slight enough, I, too enter the outside-in-land of courtyards where the women seem to be enldlessly making their tortillas and children. I spend my mornings at the midwifery clinic, Ixmucane, where every day I walk inside the legs of many a women, learning each one from the inside out. I am invited to a place the woman herself might never set eyes upon. It is there from the pink neck of womb, the entrance to the home we have all grown inside of, that I am gifted my own eyes of a woman. It is here in the dark of the body, in a land of beginnings where man and woman make one body of their own, thus creating the means to make other bodies not their own, here where love can become union and the lack of it- pain and disease. It is here that I am graced with an education of sensitivity, perceptivity, and the raw reality of passages. What more, within each day I am the fortunate recipient of many a handfull of mystery as I watch the phenomenal stretch of fully held souls, lives still small and wet in brown bellies. I live with Lucrecia, Rafael, Mercedes and 2 dozen parakeets, the novel I call my family. They laugh about a lot of things.... my mom makes my bed! She reminds me how to use silverware appropriately and cook great food. Their house inspires strange dreams and simple pleasure. Their catholosismic hearts are huge and in sweet evolution love to mingle with my radical ways. I don't tell them however, about how my thighs grow weak with the lack of a lover to hold with all my heart and might. Meanwhile this heart grows stronger to miss a man so good. Most days are rico; long of light and work. The full moon brought an eclipse, an earthquake and a birth. Then a trip to the sea and a starry swim. This "2 1/2 hour" journey to Montericco became an all day excursion with about 7 buses, a boat and one glorious ride in the back of a debilidated pickup with a dozen wet Guatemalans as the rain came and sent us all laughing in a snuggle of content and joyful acceptance. Such days are my medicine and the sky- my lover. This sky, my park and my mountain, when the hills are too far to reach. This sky can take my breath away or give me laughter too. I'm a little homesick, making plans for funny faces with strangers and trying a new flavor of ice cream. I wish you all love and interesting weather.

Hasta Pasta,
Sarah Naomi
Hygieia Student

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Update April 30 2002

March 27, 2002
Dr Jonathan Collin
Editor in Chief
Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients

PUBLISHED May 2002 issue

To the Editor:

Drs Null, Rasio and Feldman have told us (Women’s Health Risks Associated with Orthodox Medicine, 3 parts, January-April, 2002) that orthodox birth attendants of the second half of the 20th Century have erred considerably. The more prenatal care they provided, the worse the pregnancy outcomes. Widespread routine ultrasound screening provided no benefits, while significantly adding to costs, as did the popular blood serum screening for Down’s Syndrome. It took decades of studies to prove that breast-feeding was overwhelmingly healthier than cow’s milk.

Episiotomies, which can now correctly be called, like foreskin removal, sexual mutilations, since they have been shown to create more 3rd and 4th degree lacerations than they prevent, were performed routinely by many orthodox birth attendants, if indeed they permitted a normal vaginal birth. Instead they intervened in record numbers, using cesarean sections en masse. Finally the authors showed evidence that depriving a woman of her uterus has little benefit, and is often harmful, but only after millions of women had already lost theirs.

These errors and interventions imply a profound disregard for natural processes. It is hard to imagine how scientifically trained people could think that cow’s milk is better for a human infant than human mothers’ milk, or that removing half of the normal skin from the normal penis could be in any way beneficial. It is as if they never heard of evolution, or ever imagined the millions of years that nature took to evolve the optimal food for infants. Most of the erroneous short-sighted decisions, motivated by greed, also meant that professionalism (what is best for my patient) was lost.

But the authors have not gone far enough with their indictment. This generation of birth attendants, with their massive interventions, has deprived too many women of the seminal birth experience, an experience that empowers women in a way no other can do. They have failed to just let women give birth, a process that is as safe as life gets, and to humbly assist them in this endeavor.

George C Denniston MD
Clinical Asst Professor, Family Medicine
University of Washington, Seattle

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From a Hygieia college student studying at the earth school of Jamaica, here is an email sent to her family and friends.

May 4th, 2002, Oracabessa, Jamaica, West Indies

I'm about to begin my final day in Jah's land by the deep blue.. I feel that familiar cloudy sensation that I get before lift off, when I am somewhere between here and there, somewhere high up and full of strange air. But still I hear my rat Rascal in the kitchen, nibbling my papaya, still my neck is memorizing the touch of the night wind as it speaks of the rain. As Jamaican hips grind away in dancehalls, beaches and bedrooms, as stray dogs converse across the neighborhoods and chickens whine about their early mornings to come, as mothers push out babies and the earth wraps it's blacknight soil around a million gestating yams...I am here still. On this precious island. I feel in my body the width and breadth of a culture where it has penetrated my personal eternity and will mercilously hold my eyes open to a more complete unity. One that our world is ! demanding of us.
This new love in me, this new dance done in the dark of the dark with the dark, this softening slow cooking chicken foot soup of me is yet to know it's implications in the familiar of my homeland. I think this is my favorite part, integration. I love packing and unpacking. I love the surreal little capsule in the sky full of strangers and pretty ladies with drinks and peanuts. I love getting off the plane and walking out the airport door. How will my black and my white like each other. Will I feel gray? Will they let me through customs with these sentimental souveniers swaying in my hips, toughening my soles and dripping from my eyes? Will I remember to leave the secrets of the land here where they belong, trusting the laws of context.. For I know that their language has forever been tuned to the crickets that play harmony to nighttime conversations, that their eyes are adjusted to a b! righter blue, a deeper green and a shady history. I don't know what will come with me. I surely didn't shop much. I think that sometimes my hands might tingle with the memory of the drum I've been having my weekly affair with, the drum that shows me some Africa. I also think when I walk slower, I have more time. I might miss the breadfruit and the children, but not for long. There are people playing everywhere, and new flavors seem to be found in the funniest places (for the cells of the tongue are remarkable).
For now, blessed love from Jamaica,
Sarah
Imoanharas
Loki Blue
Bly

---

[ Leilah McCracken wrote: ]
Hi Jeannine -

I'm asking wise folks I know to answer the following for a new web page I'm making (see Freestone LINKS for BirthLove website). Women write a lot with this question... and a page to direct them to would be great. Any input you would have would be greatly appreciated. "My husband is very reluctant to talk about homebirth with me. In fact, he is almost violently opposed to the idea! Every time I mention it he gets angry- he says he refuses to watch me or my baby die because of some nonsense I read on the Internet. But I know inside that I have to have a healing, peaceful homebirth... my first two births were very interfered-with, and I really feel the interventions were for nothing. But my husband insists that they were important, because the doctor said they were. What can I do to change his mind?"

Here is my response;

First, it is not our jobs to change our husband's minds. No one likes to be changed, except a baby in wet diapers. I would rather honor him for his sensitivity and concern. Now to address the bottomline fear, maternal death -- When this dialogue happened in my marriage more than twenty years ago, I told my husband that he couldn't get rid of me that easily. And I reminded him that I was going to die one day anyway so his desire to "not let me die" is appreciated, if eventually fruitless. I would then tell him that women who give freebirth are not only more grateful but more sexual with their mates afterwards than women who chose another way (and cite Marilyn Moran's study published in the APPPAH Journal). This fact usually gets the father's attention.

Last, I would listen within to what my baby wants. I trust that this baby chose both parents, not just me, the one who wants a freebirth. Rather than position myself with "I have the right idea", I would continue to listen to my partner and encounter each fear as it arises, knowing that on a cellular level, the baby communicates with the father as well as with me. When there are no more fears to explore, then the ordinary miracle happens and suddenly the father shifts to be present with this birth in the way your baby wants.

Or, as there is no end to how inventive our minds can be when dealing with fear of the unknown, the father continues to hold the cautionary space as the mother gives birth the way the baby needs to be born. Either way, the point is that the baby is born.

In other words, this doesn't have to be an either/or situation -- you can have both -- the birth you desire and the respect for your partner to deepen by understanding him, rather than trying to change him. If you keep trying to change him, one day you may realize that he is not the man you fell in love with and he says, "Of course not. You wanted me to change so I did, for you." Yet if he doesn't evolve for himself, he will not be his truth and then Eros flies away.

All I can do is be my truth. I fell in love with my partner for who he is as well as who he is becoming. If I stay in my truth, yet be open and unattached to the outcome, my partner may align with me, or he may not. Ideally he will be supportive and yet, as all of us midwives know, birth happens regardless of "support" if the mother stays true to her purpose.

Blessed Be & Blessed Do Gentle Mother,
Jeannine Parvati Baker

---

HOUSEKEEPING for the PLANET
Or What I Did Over The Spring Break
     This week I did a radical thing. I recycled an old gynecological table from the DI (a.k.a. the Deseret Industries -- our only 2nd hand store in town). The day I bought it, our caravan was already filled with groceries and bedding plants so we left it for the maximum time at the store until we could return. It looked to me that we'd need to haul a trailer, yet my youngest, Halley, sized it up by eye and announced that it would just fit and how. Two days later we return and sure enough, the crew at the D.I. measured the table, then the indoor space in the caravan, and said it would barely fit.

     By now we had a small crowd gathered around the outdoor section of the store. Not your ordinary white elephant item, the table was in mint condition, enameled with that not green, but yet not beige, color of doctors' offices. With a dolly, the weighty, adversarial table was loaded into the caravan and getting it in was another engineering problem. No light piece of equipment, the gynecological exam tables from the 1950's were constructed to last: No planned obsolescence for these pioneer doctors -- this table was heavy! Luckily, I had a few small and sturdy carpets on the floor of the caravan, which were utilized to slide / push the exam table inside. The door barely shut.

     I thanked the guys, two big strong men, who helped us outside and quipped (after observing their hard work in loading the table), "Well, my neighbors and I are going to have a lot of fun with this table today!" Meaning, of course, unloading it from the caravan. One of the crew then said, "Are you going to do some exams then?" I could just read his mind -- a new kind of coffee klatch is born! I was sorry to disturb his fantasy with my clarification. Ordinarily I wouldn't let the truth interfere with a good story but I had the reputation of my small town to consider.

     On the drive home we quickly saw a problem -- the exam table doors and drawers would open and close as our caravan moved. Not quietly open and close, mind you, but with a explosion of heavy metal which reminded me of why I was blessed amongst mothers -- none of my teens liked heavy metal music. Yet now I had an unrehearsal of this raucous music in the back seat. Perhaps the clanging of the exam table drawers was the ringing of the Liberty Bell -- a clarion call for women to get up, off of our backs and stop being victims of our own fertility? Once we pulled in the driveway, to everyone's relief, the cacophony ceased -- yet we had that Liberty Bell ringing in our ears for awhile. I wondered what other stories this table could tell.

     Once home, we then didn't know what to do with the table: Where to put it, IF we could actually put it somewhere -- I wasn't strong enough on my own, nor were my two pubescent children to actually lift it. The neighbors I originally had in mind to help were down with the flu. We decided to not do anything about it and I instead drove around town for a few days with the massive metal table taking up all available space in the caravan, with the drawers and doors grimly taped shut, of course.

     At last comes the weekend, and the father and oldest brother come home. They couldn't believe it at first. "What? You have a WHAT in the caravan?" By that time, the children and I had decided to put the table into the oldest brother's room. Needless to say, once let in on this idea, he wasn't too keen. "How about a conversation piece?" I offered. Somehow, my twenty year old son didn't want that to be the conversation in his room.

     Once more, my youngest daughter sizes up the situation. "The table will fit in the dining room if we move the chair and plant stand" Halley suggests. Now I am wondering what sort of conversation over meals this piece would inspire? Would the talk turn toward other forms of oral gratification? I am unsure -- yet as our son didn't want it, and the dining room was off to the side of the main living room and not central, I felt suddenly a change of heart. Now I am like Brigham Young, the Mormon prophet (with whom I share the same birthday, along with Marilyn Monroe)-- he said, when leading the pioneers to the Salt Lake Valley, "THIS IS THE PLACE."

     So with a lot of advice from Halley and myself, the men of the household did move the gynecological table from the caravan and into the dining room. I was ecstatic!! Here in my own house was a wonderful theatre piece -- a prop of mythic proportion! I imagined Hygieia College talent shows with this table as the centerpiece. We already had puppets of a doctor, a witch, and a devil that we used to perform an irreverent skit at the International Primal Conference. Now we had the perfect "stage" for our Punch and Judy Show -- "Gidget goes Gynecological". I could hardly wait -- only one challenge here however: it wouldn't fit into my luggage for a road show and I was doubtful my neighbors would enjoy the cabaret or appreciate a bashing of the sacred priest craft, modern gynecologists, in whom they place their trust. There are just some things that we don't joke about around here in these parts, stranger.... 

     At this time, the table has yet to fulfill all of its creative potential. Right now it has many houseplants and an occasional cat atop it. With a table cloth, it has been liberated as an instrument of torture and control, into a support for new life, for sustaining beauty. This is what I meant when I began -- I did a most radical thing this last week. I transformed an exam table with stirrups, historically used to look for what is wrong about being a woman, into a garden -- in other words, all that is very right about being a woman.

Jeannine Parvati Baker
25 March 2000
Joseph Utah


More to come ...



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