Hypnobirthing - Tumblr Posts
The hypnobirthing book by Marie F. Mongan also talks about this.
My sisters who have given birth love using midwives to help them deliver and we like to say we have birthing parties. It is extremely valuable for whichever one is giving birth to have many of us sisters there (there are 5 girls in my family plus a sister-in-law and my mom).
The birthing process is natural and wonderful, hard but good and should be treated as such.
My sisters and sister-in-law who have given birth work almost exclusively with midwives and two of them infinitely prefer home births (where they feel safe and comfortable and can crawl into their own bed afterward) to hospitals (where it's sterile, often associated with fear, and visitors are quite limited).
Hospitals now can be very good places to give birth, especially if there are complications, but most births don't have complications. Fortunately, many hospitals now work with a midwife group so if you're worried about complications but still want a more calm birth experience, you can have that option.
I’m reading a book about midwifery in New England in the eighteenth century and I’m struck by how pro-woman their treatment of birth was compared to how it’s done today.
Like, it was the norm for labouring women to be surrounded by a midwife and several female friends who all performed some kind of function to aid the woman in delivering her baby safely. Male physicians hated the social tradition and dismissed the gathering of women as facilitating “gossip” and as a hindrance on the rare occasion they attended a birth.
The work of midwives was so valorised that many town maps from this period clearly identify where every midwife was located, and paying the midwife was one of the biggest household expenses alongside taxes.
Midwives developed their own manuscripts full of medicinal remedies for all aspects of reproduction. Birth was managed by women themselves – it was a collective female ritual.
Male obstetricians, motivated in my opinion by a deep-seated envy of women’s reproductive power, began to steal and suppress women’s wisdom around childbirth in the nineteenth century, and by the twentieth century unnecessary medical intervention in childbirth had exploded.
We need to make childbirth woman-centred again.