Birthowl’s natural childbirth

…If birth were just about science, then women would have understood by now that good health generally means strong, healthy birth and that meddling can interfere with the outcome. But birth is human and alive and responsive. The way women think about it comes not only from professionals but from their mothers, the ones who’ve given birth before them.

The stories that mothers tell their daughters about birth have been shaped by nearly a century of experience in hospital birth. Here’s what today’s women said they learned:

“We never talked much about those things in our family.”

“I know my mother was terrified of childbirth…but she never said anything.”

“I think with my brothers she was out completely.”

“My mother never said anything.”

We have silent grandmothers today. Older women without birth stories. Women without life-giving poetry. Themes, rich with pattern and variation of pattern, do not lap from a mother’s experience into her daughter’s imagination.

…It seems as if birth, as an orphan, has been disconnected from its source.

From ‘A Wise Birth’ by Penny Armstrong, CNM and Sheryl Feldman