The Dangers of Giving Birth Today: The No-Faith Mentality

I was speaking to a woman who wants to homebirth but is unsure that she could birth unmedicated. I mentioned that throughout history, women have birthed without pain medication. Today we do have better maternal death rates, but the decrease is most likely nothing to do with the availability of pain medication. I realized, also, that traditionally, centuries ago, women even as young as 12 were giving birth--without medication. If my great-great grandmother could do it (and she did) at the age of 12, why is it that so many women years older than that have such self-doubt?

We have been programmed to associate hospitals with birth, birth with danger. We have been trained to believe that hospitals are safety, that doctors are the protectors of our mortality. We have been taught to rely on them for advice not only about our health but about our lifestyle, even our approach to parenting our little ones. Rather than empowering women to trust their intuition, their bodies, their strength, we have crippled them by convincing them that they cannot handle the pain of birth without pain-numbing prescriptions.

At 19, I was a victim of this mentality. I knew women had given birth throughout the centuries, many of them dying in childbirth. Modern obstetrics, I thought, had to be the reason that we now have much better outcomes. I hadn't really thought about all of the other factors that must have contributed. I just knew that the hospital was where women go to give birth from what I'd seen in the world around me & on TV. That was just how it was done. An obedient patient, I reluctantly consented to every intervention. I put my faith into the hands of the CNM doing my prenatal care and the ob/gyn 'delivering' my child. (I find that to be such an odd term, considering the woman is the one doing all of the work.)