Rethinking Childbirth: How to empower ourselves and others naturally

Don’t mind my emotions as I get into a topic I’m passionate about – reclaiming childbirth!

Hello, hello.

All right, we’re going to talk about a topic today that is extremely, extremely near and dear to my heart. And this is rethinking childbirth. And I can speak from myself: 25 years ago, I was pregnant and having my first child. I’ve had three others from then, four total. Have had one miscarriage, so I’ve kind of got the gamut of all of those.

Pregnancy is not an Emergency

What I am seeing happening today is that women are being treated as medical emergencies from the beginning of their pregnancy.

I had a really great OB that monitored all of my pregnancies. I chose to birth with a midwife, and he told me, he goes, I’m a surgeon. I just like to show up and cut people. That’s what I’m trained to do. He’s like, you normal births just bore me. You don’t even need me. And he was actually very pro-midwifery because he said most women just needed to be left alone, supported, and birthed.

Skyrocketing C-Sections

And so what we’re seeing within the hospital sessions right now is that in some places, one out of two births are C-sections. How did we survive anywhere, if one out of two of us needed to have a C-section to have a baby come out?

When we look further, and we really dive into these statistics, what we’re finding is all of the interventions that they’re doing from the moment we get to the hospital to the moment that we have these babies, each one of those interventions pushes us closer to a C-section.

And so here, you’re being set up to have a C-section and then told, well, you failed. Your body couldn’t do this. “You couldn’t start labor, but yet you were induced. You couldn’t have this baby because you weren’t ready to.”

Empower Yourself

So now, we have probably one of the most empowering moments. And I have been there with women. I’ve been in the birthing room when they have either birthed for the first time, or maybe they’ve birthed a second child or a third child, but it’s the first time that they’ve done it with no intervention.

And I’ve seen the look on their face, and I’ve seen the power that surges through them. And that’s such an incredible rite of passage that is being stolen from us under this guise of safety. Literally, as my OB said, “2% of you women have trouble, but I treat 100% of you as if you were that 2%.”

So, that means that 98% of us are getting treated as if we’re a problem, as if we’re a medical emergency.

Doulas and Midwives

I really encourage you to stand up, to look at your birth plan, put people in the room that will support you, put a doula, make sure you have two of them. Put somebody in there that’s going to help you in the time that you need it the most.

That’s what we were created for. Women, we were surrounded by other women, and we were supported, and we were encouraged, and we were empowered to bring this baby into this world.

And that’s what I would really love to see happen again.

Talk to you all soon. Bye-bye.