My joyous birth story

Excerpt taken from the amaaaaazing new book, A Modern Women’s Guide to a Natural Empowering Birth ($34.95)… the book I wish I’d had when pregnant for the first time, and something that should be mandatory reading for every mum-to-be in Australia   Check it out!

I’ve always had a robust, down-to-earth philosophy about health. I haven’t taken so much as a cough lolly since I was about 15, and I don’t have a doctor. I believe if you eat green vegies, exercise, sleep properly, get some sunshine, play in the dirt and think happy thoughts, you’ll rarely encounter illness… and when you occasionally do, not only is it excellent for your immune system, but it’s usually masking an emotional upset that needs to be addressed.
I first fell pregnant in May 2008 and I remember walking through the house on a sunny day and saying out of nowhere to my husband, “I don’t think I want to go to hospital. I just want to have the baby at home.” No fears or worries ever entered my head – the idea just felt right, relaxed and natural. We put “home birth Adelaide” into Google and immediately found Lisa Barrett, a phenomenal midwife who has birthed thousands of babies in hospitals and homes (everything from breech births to twins and cords wrapped around necks), and has an awesome holistic philosophy.
Throughout my easy pregnancy, Lisa, my husband and I met monthly for cups of tea. I had no ultrasounds, because I didn’t want to blast my fetus with radiation, and I never saw a doctor or obstetrician; Lisa performed all my check-ups and gave me positive, empowering books to read, such as Ina May Gaskin’s Spiritual Midwifery. I ate properly, consumed no caffeinated, carbonated or alcoholic drinks, and used nothing on my skin and hair but organic herbal oils.
We had a plastic pool all ready to fill for a water birth, but when my waters finally broke – nine days early, at 1am! – I realised I didn’t desire it. I filled the house with candles, played some soft music, and let my body guide me. I did lots of wriggling and stretching on hands and knees, and as my cervix slowly opened, so did my throat – I made louder and louder noises, which greatly assisted the pains.
The contractions went throughout the night, while the midwife sat and knitted, and my husband sipped cups of tea in the corner. It was very quiet and beautiful, and rain pattered on the roof. I kept my eyes closed and focused within. My body was releasing so many natural chemicals, endorphins, oxytocins and adrenalin, I was sailing high as a kite! It was an awesome natural high. I honestly don’t remember the ouchy bits!
Around 5am, Lisa suggested I sit on the toilet so that gravity could assist with pushing. I delivered my baby half-standing up, hanging off my husband’s neck at 8:28am. My baby boy went to the breast and fed within about one minute (his appetite has never ceased since!) After a while the placenta was delivered and I felt absolutely wide awake, exhilarated and glowing. I held him against my chest, skin-to-skin, for most of the first 24 hours for bonding and natural temperature regulation.
I had a three dimensional tear but I declined stitches. The midwife told me to “keep my knees together” sitting and standing for a week, and it healed back together naturally. I also bathed it in saltwater and swam in the ocean. We also chose not to vaccinate our little boy after all the research we’d looked at in this area.
After my homebirth I found myself intuitively doing lots of ‘natural parenting’ things such as co-sleeping, and later, feeding him only pureed organic fruit and vegetables (no processed, sugar-crashing wheat or grain products such as biscuits, bread and pasta). I found my body was incredibly in tune with my baby’s – we could burp, fart and awaken from a sound sleep simultaneously! It was like we had a very strong energetic cord still linking us, and this lasted for months.
Afterwards my husband, a chiropractor, was telling one of his patients how fantastic our birth was. She asked, “Did you have a homebirth?”
“Yes,” said my husband. “How did you know?”
“Because you only hear people who’ve had homebirths talking like that,” she answered. “Never hospital births.”
I got pregnant again in May 2010 and this time I REALLY took it in my stride. I was almost brutally efficient – woke up with labour pains around 5am the day after my due date, and the contractions deepened over the course of the day, textbook-style, while I walked around the garden, watched TV and ate Lindt chocolate!
The pain was actually worse the second time (which other people have said often happens), or in any case, I can remember it more vividly as it was during daylight. However I simply told myself “It’s just muscle fatigue from the cramping”, and also, “It’s totally natural and in about two hours it will be all over for the rest of your life!”
When I felt “pushy”, I knew exactly what I had to do this time, and how it would feel. I half-stood once more, opened my legs as far apart as I could, and began to do one great, big, long push. Halfway through I stopped and gasped, “Is the head out yet?!”
“Not yet,” said Lisa, crouched between my legs, who was of course helping me once again. So I kept on pushing and out slithered my baby girl – in one long push! – and no tear this time. The placenta emerged 10 mins later, again much quicker and easier than the first time, because I knew what it felt like and what I needed to do. Breast-feeding was also no problem whatsoever. My daughter had a bit of a twisted foot and some conjunctivitis, but we squeezed a bit of breast milk in her eyes, and regularly straightened out her ankle with stretches and some chiropractic adjustments over the following days, and it sorted itself out naturally within a few weeks.
Having had two such fun, happy, easy, fear-free birth experiences, I now wholeheartedly cringe whenever I hear hospital horror stories. In my opinion, most girls do not have the confidence or health philosophy to feel strong enough to say “NO” to doctors, obs, gynos and bossy hospital midwives who seem to make every personal decision for them, and teach them from the get-go that birth should be unbearable, frightening and dangerous. The body really is perfectly architecturally designed to give birth, and the less it’s interfered with, the happier and calmer the baby (and mummy) feel. Doctors are so jumpy and quick to introduce drugs, needles, vacuums, surgery and other forms of butchery when often, the body and/or baby still needs a little time to turn, descend and birth naturally. We do not run out into the field every time a goat or a sheep gives birth with white coats, stethoscopes and machinery, and nor do we expect blossoms, trees or vegetables to perform “on time!” in our gardens, forcing them to follow our own tightly controlled, impatient human timelines. According to the World Health Organisation, only 12% of births are “high risk” enough to actually require the sorts of procedures that hospitals offer. And yet your average pregnant woman receives all of them. Lots of mums begin labouring nicely at home, but lapse into ‘shut down’ mode when they arrive at the hospital and are told they have to give birth within a time limit. Mum freezes up with adrenalin, the labour halts, the doctors rush in with forceful procedures, and… well, it’s easy to see the downhill series of events that happen after that.
We need to stop drugging and slicing up our babies and dragging them forcibly out of the womb into glaring, noisy, negative environments, injecting them immediately with toxic chemicals and slathering their skin with petroleum based “skincare” products. And don’t even get me started on elective caesareans! I don’t know what’s worse – the mum who deprives her baby of the natural yeasts, bonding chemicals and vital cranial moulding from the vaginal tunnel, and herself of an incredible life rite-of-passage, or the doctor who selfishly schedules her caesarean so it doesn’t interfere with his Christmas holidays! Another thing that worries me is that often women feel, deep down, they’d quite like a home birth, but their husbands get scared and talk them out of it. We need to honour and support pregnant mums’ intuition. I would love to live in a society that is less medicalised and more trusting of life’s natural flow; a society where women who choose to homebirth and not vaccinate their children are not publicly vilified or threatened with fines and gaol. At the very least, I’d love to hear more joyous words used to describe pregnancy and birth, and for women to share more heart-warming birth stories. .

Further reading: Birth: at home or at hospital?

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Category: Sex and wellbeing