Do women really "birth how they live"?
I have had several women bring this phrase to me that has been bandied about in freebirth circles and I wanted to explain what I understand about this phrase versus how it is used.
On a general level it is true that often we can make educated guesses about a woman's life story by the birth choices that she makes, if her previous feminine initiations have been in power or powerlessness, how she feels about authority, how comfortable she is in her own body, how much she trusts her own judgment.
This can reflect in how willing she is to accede to unnecessary intervention and an experience in which somebody else is wielding all the power.
Unfortunately, this phrase is usually used to denigrate women who have medicalised births, the implication being that they are somehow oppressed, weaker, or less than. By contrast, it holds the home and freebirthing mother up as a paragon of anti-establishment, natural health, pro-woman, whatever other positive groupthink attribute you wish to give her.
This dichotomy is simply not true. Anybody who reads the news knows there are women who are scared of birth and who would hand over the control to somebody else if they could who have babies in their cars and bathroom floors with no medical professional every day.
Most of the time, the body does what it's designed to do whether or not we believe it can or we feel good about it. Grantly Dick-Read's whole book Birth Without Fear was inspired by one such woman who knew so little about birth she didn't even know it was supposed to hurt.
This phrase also doesn't take into account that birth is an *opportunity* for transformation. For the woman who has been made to feel powerless, now she says no more and is reborn from the fire that cleanses and renews. For the woman who is so amazed by what her body has done it sends her down a rabbit hole into other ways she can liberate herself and others.
For some women, birth trauma gives her a warped and ugly key that eventually unlocks the many doors of her past and future and like the goddess Inanna she is able through a huge effort to rise from the underworld into her power.
Work as a doula long enough and you will learn never, ever to make assumptions about how a woman will birth. For some women, the surrender of natural birth is the gateway to healing. More rarely, the surrender comes from accepting a change of pathways and a medicalised entry into motherhood.
Birth is the journey of the soul, the mother's and the baby's. The woman surrenders to the new life moving through her as she is decimated and rebuilt as a mother and the baby chooses it's entrance into the world. The baby's soul is coming from a place of such love and deep time that if we were able to truly perceived the vastness of that soul's journey we would release any limits our conscious mind places on it.
As freebirth and home birth community members, as much as unnecessary medicalisation is infuriating, as much as perhaps we have had to fight for and educate ourselves for our births, we need to be humble enough to admit that *we don't know* what makes some births go well and others not, by our limited perception.
It's trendy these days to put out polarising statements about natural birth that people can flock to and band together to give them a sense of solidarity and the illusion of control over the medical system and even birth itself.
Let's not turn what should be thoughtful, curious and expansive conversations with women about their initiations past and present into social media quips.
At this point the birth world is a minefield with everybody claiming to have the answer. Just accept birth is science, just stay out of hospital, just do what the doctor tells you, just remember it isn't supposed to be painful. Illusions of control. As the midwife in The Birth House says "ain't no exact way to have a baby... Like catchin' snowflakes, she's gone before I got it figured out"
I hope that if I ever stop being curious about birth I have the decency and self-awareness to stop participating.
It is ignorant and cruel to turn birth outcomes into some kind of moral and personal failing. To be frank, it's being used to sell you something. Membership to a club that, if you don't meet the criteria, wants you to see it as something being intrinsically wrong with you.
That's quite convenient, and those who espouse this phrase expect women to fade into the shadows if they don't fit the narrative. As a doula, I often end up being sought out by the women in the shadows.
If somebody chooses to abuse us while we are heavily pregnant or in the birth room, we are not weak for our body's freeze or fawn response. If we truly need help, if in another time we and/or our baby would have died, it is not because we just aren't radical enough. It is not your fault.
And it's just not true. I had the most ecstatic freebirth while tolerating the most awful abuse in my personal life. I was NOT birthing how I lived, in misery and despair, but the birth was a taste of bliss that plunged me even deeper into hell, and gradually, painfully, out again.
