My daughter came to me in a dream 4 years before she was born. I was alone. I birthed her into the morning, the bathroom bathed in gorgeous sunlight and then lifted her from the water to greet her. Only she was a boy in my dreams. It was perfect. She was healthy and happy and I knew exactly what my body needed to do. I had not ever felt anything like that before, a knowing that my intuition and primal nature was in perfect alignment with my path.
The dream came during a time when I was still disconnected from my body, my femininity, and my intuition. I dreamt about this baby during a very stressful time of my life when my brother nearly died & was hospitalized. The events that lead up to this dream involved me trusting myself fully and listening to my intuition for the first time since I was a child. I had put away my empathic intuitive side early on. My brothers' near death experience helped me realize myself, as trusting my senses ultimately saved his life. Then entered Maya.
When I was pregnant with her this dream came back to me. I knew inherently that I would not birth her within the allopathic system and that it would be on my terms. That dream gave me confidence and connection to the birth process. The knowing I had was that if I could trust my intuition & my primal senses to help save my brother then why wouldn't I birth in a place where those senses were given space to be present & trusted?
9 Reasons For Choosing FreeBirth
1. My own birth. My mom had epilepsy and I was sitting breech in July of 1985. The plan was for me to come into the world via cesarean. So my mom went into labor around 41 weeks. They prepped her for surgery, gave her a spinal epidural to numb her & began. The epidural didn’t work. She felt most of the beginning of surgery. Even when she was screaming & telling the doctor she was feeling the pain, he didn't believe her. After a minute he realized she was feeling everything & had her put under. My mother was unconscious when I was born. I didn't meet my mom for some time until she came around. It was a pretty traumatic experience for both of us. I have felt that I've brought this experience into my life. I have had a distaste for authority and the allopathic system since I was a child. I have to believe that my trauma in birth was a huge factor in the mistrust, given how sensitive and empathic I am.
Though I had mistrust, I still participated in the allopathic system for a long time. It seems like nearly every time I have employed them to help me, I have had incredibly negative experiences. I've felt robbed, I've felt small, I've been degraded, I've felt violated, I've been told I am making up my feelings, I've been threatened, I've been called names for speaking my needs, I've waited for hours & felt completely unserved. I can only think of a couple of times I've used the allopathic system and felt really supported. The majority of my experiences have been shitty. This led me to changing my eating, learning about nutrition and herbal medicine, and ultimately making my own medicine and taking charge of my own health. I stopped giving away my power of knowing my body.
So when it came time for me to make choices about birth, I had zero trust for the hospital. The more I learned about the way the majority of women are treated in birth, the more I saw just how dangerous birthing in a hospital really is. The hospital is made for emergencies, birth is not an medical event and is rarely an emergency. I am grateful for hospitals in those events when birth becomes an emergency and then they support families when adverse situations arise.
I have cellular memories of being taken away at birth, away from my family, not able to feel my mothers heart beating, or the warmth of her skin, etc. My first seconds on this earth I was violated by the allopathic system and taken away from my life source, my mother. She had her baby taken away from her because she wasn't conscious at the time. Another big part of my trauma was that when I would search for midwives or for birth centers during my own pregnancy I saw so much fear of breech delivery. I would be risked out of many practices if my baby were in a breech presentation. Then I'd either have to birth alone or go to a hospital where the typical protocol for breech is an automatic cesarean!!!! Breach is not an emergency nor does it warrant an extremely dangerous major abdominal surgery. Most physicians give c-sections for breech babies simple because they are not trained in how to support a vaginal delivery. With all their med school education how is it possible that doctors are not being trained to handle a breech delivery, it's a variation of normal. I knew I would stay home if my baby was breech. My provider or myself would be trained to support a breech delivery..
2. The thought of giving birth in a hospital made me feel much more anxious and uncomfortable than the thought of staying home, even alone. I had many anxiety dreams during my pregnancy where I would be in the hospital having my power stripped away & I would get so angry. I would turn into a mama bear & fight back. The instinct and the wound from my own birth were so powerful I knew that I would just avoid getting myself into that position to begin with. I would stay home. No one would take my baby from me, no one would take my power from me. It was a really simple choice, I felt in my bones that staying home would bring me the most power and the most peace in birth.
3. I did not have a birth provider who I felt could truly serve me in birth. I am not against having a birth attendant, I am just very cautious when choosing someone to hold that space for me. It cannot simply be anyone just for the sake of having someone there. It has to be the right person who understands undisturbed normal physiologic birth & who completely respects me and my choices. At the time there was not anyone in my area who was free and could truly meet my needs.
In the future I now know many midwives who I would love to have be with me and hold space for me. There are too many midwives in my opinion that are very medical & can turn the home into a hospital. Through my prayers and meditating I found that I was on the right path and that birthing alone was exactly what I needed in this birth with Maya. It was profound and healing. There was no one to tell me what to do, when to push, what position to assume, how to nurse etc. No one to scare me into thinking that co-sleeping is dangerous or that I could supplement if I needed.
4. I wanted to experience ecstatic birth hormones. The hormones of labor cascade flawlessly during an undisturbed birth. Those hormones help us to manage pain, keep us safe, and feel the joyous high that we do when we birth. They help us to bond and connect with our babies and help our milk production. When birth is disturbed these hormones aren't being released by the body in the optimal way we need them too. During the last moments when she was entering the world I felt time literally stop. I felt like I was in a safe bubble with people I loved around me, god, my ancestors, the light, the sun etc. I was protected and could feel ecstasy throughout my body. I was transmuted into a different realm when my daughter was born. It was the ultimate surrender and felt more powerful and full of life and confidence than I have ever felt before. Every single one of my cells was alive and radiating love. Of course I was exhausted and in shock from such a powerful and fast labor & also felt euphoria. My heart swelled and opened to a love greater than any I have ever known.
5. I didn't want to feel like a machine birthing on someone else's clock. I read Birth As An American Rite of Passage and was absolutely shocked. The way that women are treated like birth machines in the hospital is sickening. This book went through each of the typical inventions that babies and mamas experience in birth in the hospital. It opened my eyes to what the societal messages to newborn babies are. Machines and technology are ultimately better suited to take care of you than your own mother, than your own primal nature. You don't need your mother when we have these expensive technologically advanced incubators. The hospital model intentionally separates families. They are designed to create separation between baby and mama. This may sounds harsh but the system was designed to be misogynistic and to demean women and families. If they were helping to connect mama and baby then baby wouldn't be as easily controllable throughout their lives.
Birthing on a clock is just another part of how the hospital system works. There are rules that don't allow women to birth for so many hours, or have their waters open without being in labor for X amount of time. It's anxiety provoking. Why are those conditions in place for all women across the board? Why aren't treated more as individuals in birth? When I was at home I chose not to know any time. I didn't want to see a phone or a clock. It was surreal and beautiful to not be aware of time. It was as if time stood still and I was in an alternate reality.
6. The majority of the birth stories that I have read and heard were highly disturbing and traumatic. They helped me to learn what I did and did not want. They helped to shape my comfort level of what I was going to do in my own birth. I am so grateful for all the women who shared their birth stories and birth videos online for me to use as tools to understand what I did and did not want in my own birth. What I found was that a lot of women had really traumatic first births and then went on to have healing recurrent births. These stories really helped me to see what was the norm for a lot of first time moms and how to avoid those interventions.
7. I wanted my child to be born into love, not trauma. Traumatic births are hard on the babies too. A lot of babies experience unnecessary interference because of the fear projected by the provider. It's hard for them. It's already such a powerful and arduous journey that they make coming into the world. Why add any more trauma to their experience. All babies want is to be picked up by their mothers and loved. They don't need anything else but their mom. I wanted my child to not experience birth in the way that I did, through trauma. I didn't want my childs' birth to be one that they would need to heal from later on in life. I knew that this child would be very empathic like myself and that it was really important to make wise choices for my child. I recognized that things come up sometimes and though children aren't always born in peace they can work through their trauma early on. It was important to me to factor this into my decision making around birth. My 4 hour labor and birth was pretty traumatic in itself being so hard and fast. Yet it was incredible beautiful and healing. I picked my daughter up & we went straight to bed.
8. I've been giving away my power for so long I decided in my pregnancy that I wasn't going to do that anymore. There were too many times in my life when I did not listen to my intuition. There were times when I said yes and meant no or I said no but meant yes. I was a people pleaser. I grew up with the good girl mentality and didn't transition into puberty in a sacred way. My outlook on menstruation and childbirth was not a positive one. I saw my body changing as a curse. One that was shameful. I got on birth control early to "regulate my hormones." Which now I no is not possible and I now know the truth about birth control. I let those drugs take over my body & my femininity for such a long time. I deferred to men in relationships, in work situations, men in roles of authority because that was my conditioning. The deferring, the feeling small, giving away my voice and power, allowing the allopathic & education system to make choices for me felt really sickening.
Slowly over the past many years I've been taking back my power. I've started eating real food, taking charge of my health, making my own medicine, taking charge of understanding my fertility. I removed my IUD on my own one day. I was feeling numb, I didn't feel strong and feminine or empowered in my body. I was giving my power away to this device that took away my cycle. This device stole my menstruation from me. And did quite a number on my body. I felt like a woman for the first time in my life when I was no longer on birth control. And for the first time in my life I felt power and confidence through birthing my child completely on my own terms.
9. Birth Matters. Dr. Michel Odent writes lot about how our birth culture if altering the way women will be able to give birth in the future. High induction, chemical births, and high c-section rates can bring forth a culture where we no longer can give birth physiologically normal without assistance This is why it is so important for us to preserve this sacred experience. Birth is a transition for the mother and the baby. It's not something that happens to the mama and baby, it is a journey that they embark on together, birthing a child and birthing a new form of self. It can be incredibly healing, empowering, enlightening etc. It can bring us to see our true power. This rite of passage is being treated in our culture more like a machine factory production line than a shift into motherhood. Birth sets us up for life, it sets us up as parents.
<3 Sarah