Ina May's Guide to Childbirth

About what I say about fear and birth among the women we served, I don't mean that they never experienced some moments of fear or anxiety at the prospect of giving birth or during labor or wondered, will I be able to accomplish this seemingly impossible act. Such fears are quite natural. Most women have them from time to time. After all, it is not immediately obvious to most people who grow up in technological cultures, especially those in which most people live totally apart from animals, how birth can happen. But when such moments of doubt occur in these women, who know so many others who have already given birth, they are able to fall back on the sure knowledge that their closest friends and sisters and mothers have been able to do it. This knowledge then makes it possible for them to believe that they can too, whether or not they have ever witnessed the act of birth itself. The women in the community manage to re-learn and be highly successful at the kinds of female behavior that modern women in technological cultures aren't known to be good at, those that go beyond the common medical understanding of women's bodies and birth. My experiences as a midwife have taught me that women's bodies still work when their needs are met during labor and birth. Here is your chance to be exposed to a new understanding of an ancient system of knowledge that you can add to your general understanding of what birth means. Wherever and however you intend to give birth, your experience and what you can learn from it will impact your emotions, your mind, your body, and your spirit for the rest of your life. The women whom I cared for expected to give birth vaginally, for that is the way all but a few out of every hundred had their babies. They know that sometimes transport to a hospital for a cesarean, an instrumental delivery, or an epidural in late labor is necessary, but such interventions are comparatively rare. Our cesarean rate up to the year 2010 was 1.7 percent. Our forceps and vacuum extraction rate was 0.05 percent. The U.S. national cesarean rate for 2016 was 31.9 percent, with Alaska having the lowest rate, 23 percent, and Mississippi the highest, 38.2. As of 2016, hospital cesarean rates in the United States vary from a high of nearly 70 percent to a low of 7 percent. The women we assisted know that labor can be painful, but many of them know as well that labor and birth can be ecstatic. For a few, it was orgasmic. I wouldn't advise anyone to expect orgasm, but in some way it may help to know that it is possible for some women to experience birth in this way, since it implies there is nothing wrong with the innate biology of women. There is no special curse on women that makes birth a punishment. It is good to regard labor as hard work to be done, work that a long line of female ancestors did in the past that enabled us to be here at all. Acceptance is all. Anyway, whether or not the women in the community experienced labor as quite painful or not, most of them found labor and birth a transformational passage in a positive sense. Have you ever heard anyone speak positively about labor and birth before? If so, you are not alone. One of the best-kept secrets in North American culture is that birth can be ecstatic and strengthening. Ecstatic birth gives inner power and wisdom to the woman who experiences it, as you will learn from many of the birth stories told here. Even when women who have shared knowledge of women's true capacities experience pain in labor, they understand that in most cases there are ways of making the sensations of labor and birth tolerable that do not involve numbing the senses with drugs before accessing the amazing chemicals that are naturally released by the woman's own body. I'll explain more about this phenomenon later in the book, as well as those circumstances when pain relief can be a good thing. In Part 1 of this book, you will hear the voices of many women as they tell their birth stories. Some of the stories are told by the pioneering generation that collectively created the birth culture of the village. Others are told by their daughters and daughters-in-law who grew up within this culture or who have