The Obvious Instinct
Sometimes instinct can be as obvious and attention-grabbing as a loud, urgent alarm going off when confronted with something dangerous or risky.
It makes you stand up and fight, or it makes you flee for your life. This is the fight or flight response, and when it is activated, blood flow to non-essential organs is dramatically lessened. The blood flow increases to your vital fight/flee organs - your lungs, your arms, your legs.
When the uterus goes white and is drained of its blood in response to the stress hormones of fight/flight, it has nothing to provide energy to its muscles. Contractions become painful, sporadic or stop altogether.
The Subtle Instinct
Other times, the voice of instinct is very subtle and can be easily overlooked or ignored. The results are the same however, if instinct warns against going to hospital by a woman’s reluctance to get into the car while in labour, or by her reluctance to get out of the shower, or leave the home and she ignores it, things start going wrong with the natural flow of her labour.
Mothers - Real Birth Experts Due to Instinct
Childbirth is a very intuitive and primal process that the mother and baby undergo.
No one else has the information that the mother and baby do because it is not happening to them. This makes the mother the only true EXPERT AUTHORITY present at her birth. She has access to information that the care provider will never have access to.
That information may not be able to be communicated in logical, reasonable words and sentences. Maybe the mother’s body is pushing her baby out because it is TIME and she knows it and her baby knows it, but the care provider decides it can’t be time yet because she is only 9cms dilated, and that she must stop pushing..
The woman may not be able to explain that it is not her that is pushing, it is her body and that her body is doing so to further dilate the cervix and move the baby down into the birthing canal. She may not be able to explain that it is right and okay for her to do what she is doing and that to fight it would be to cause problems with birthing.
Because it is not easy to explain the reasons why a woman is doing what she is doing instinctively, because she herself may not consciously KNOW those reasons - it is easy for caregivers to exert authority over birthing women, and for women to submit to it.
Fear of Not Being An Instinctive Woman
Some women are afraid that they are not very connected to themselves, their pregnancy or their babies, and fear that they won’t have the guide of their instinct or intuitive nature during childbirth.
That fear is unfounded.
Birthing women, if left to their own devices will simply do what feels right to them - if they find themselves tired and needing a break from labour, they flop around til they find a position they can relax enough in to grab snatches of sleep.
This is instinctive - something that may not happen in institutional birth if the woman has sympathetic caregivers hovering around her offering her an escape in the form of drugs or assisted delivery when she is at her most vulnerable.
Happens to the best of them, even the most strong natural childbirth advocates.
The Whole Point!
The whole point is, a woman will find herself doing without conscious thought, things that aid and benefit labour and childbirth.
She does not NEED to have a reason, or be able to explain what she is doing. She doesn’t need to consciously know what she is doing and why she is doing it. She just needs to be able to do it because she is doing it or her body wants to do it.
In that thread, many childbirth problems are often avoided because the natural flow of that particular birth is being followed and honored.
In that same thread, should a variation or blip in the birthing process occur, the woman will do what is necessary to deal with it - like the woman who feels the urge to birth standing up with a foot propped on her bathtub…. and births a breech baby with no further complication or previous knowledge that her baby was breech and that the best birthing positions for breech are upright positions.
Most mothers will not instinctively reach to check for an umbilical cord unless the cord appears to be hindering descent of the baby. Mothers may consciously think to check for a cord because of the childbirth conditioning that once the head is born, the neck should be checked for a cord and “something” should be done to assist.
Touching the cord when it is wrapped around the neck is something most care providers can’t manage to stop themselves from doing - and in fiddling with the cord, they inadvertly interfere with the transition from cord dependance to lung dependance, or interfere with the stability of the placenta and start off a bleed that would never have occured if the cord had been left alone.
Childbirth is instinctive.
Birthing women have birthing instinct.
It is a physiological mechanism that protects and helps to bring babies Earthside safely and peacefully. It is also a mechanism that protects and safeguards mothers.
