Debunking our Culture of Fear

I heard an amazing story this weekend from a woman who is about to have her sixth child. She lives on a small moshav (settlement) in the Golan Heights where we were honored to be guests this past weekend. We began talking about childbirth because she asked me what I do, and when I'm due! I told her I'm a Perinatal Health Mentor and a doula, and I'm due in July, and that's always a good conversation starter!

She told me that all her births were completely natural. She likes to be left alone and her labors tend to go very quickly. She goes to Poriya hospital, about 40 minutes from her home, and feels very comfortable there. Since I am focused on eliminating fears around pregnancy and birth, I wanted to know how she came to choose natural birth. This is what she told me.

She said that when she was pregnant with her first, she had heard that birth is so painful and it's so hard - and she was curious about what it really felt like and if she could handle it. Once she experienced her first birth and found it to be acheivable, she decided she could do it and proceeded to have 4 more natural births and expects this next one to come in just the same way.
"But", she said, "everyone is different and I was very lucky."

Isn't that incredible? Curiosity led her to allow her body to birth her baby. I pointed out that luck had nothing to do with it! What she showed me in that short conversation was that not only was she not afraid of birth or the pain she'd heard about, but she also had to have a high level of trust in her body, in the process of having a baby, and (being a religious woman) in God. I didn't have a chance to ask her more about where her beliefs about her body and about birth came from, but it's clear that she wasn't raised in our typical western culture.

Why do we fear childbirth? Where does it come from? That's what I'm trying to find out! You can help me by filling out this very short questionnaire.

But more importanty, what are the risks of this fear? How does it affect you? How does it affect your baby? And how can we change it?

• Fear allows us to be easily persuaded. As long as pregnancy, birth and women's health needs in general are kept mysterious and scary, anyone who seems to have more knowledge than we do will be able to dictate our choices.
  

• With so many resources out there, it can be hard to weed out the truth. The main problem here is that most information you will find on women's health has an underlying agenda. Always check your source. Hospitals derive more than half their revenue from birth, so if a study or an informational pamphlet or a childbirth education course is given by the hospital, you can expect that it will tout the wonders of interventions which they can conveniently bill for. Let me be clear: I am not here to say that a hospital will intentionally do harm to a patient for the purpose of creating more revenue. (At least I hope not!!) What I am saying is that you can find proof for anything that you are trying to prove. My husband likes to say that for each study, there is an equal and opposite study, and also that research causes cancer in lab rats... well, anyway...! The point is that it is very hard to find information that doesn't come from a source who's soul purpose is to benefit the mother and baby. And it can absolutely come from the opposite end as well! Those who are out to prove that medicine is a crock and only babies born natural have a "birth day" (as opposed to a "delivery day" - yes, this is a statement that has been actually published!) can scare you away from technology that might very well be necessary for your particular situation! And although you may hear fewer horror stories from "natural" birthers than from the medical world, there are absolutely situations that require the use of the wealth of medical knowledge and technology that humans have developed over the past 5000+ years!
  

So how do we learn the TRUTH? How can I, a pregnant woman, know that I am making choices based on knowledge and evidence, and not out of fear of the unknown? How can I know if that emergency C-section was what saved my baby and that it wasn't the machine's margin of error that indicated stress to begin with?

That is the journey I am taking. And the first step is to increase our knowledge and for it to come from a source with no hidden agenda. We need to get a balanced understanding of our bodies, of this miraculous process of pregnancy and become so comfortable with our understanding of it that we can feel confident in our choices and our outcomes.

Freedom is born of knowledge, knowledge is gained by learning.