Ina May's Guide to Childbirth: Part 1

Available on Amazon

Each night I've been reading a birth story or two from Part I of Ina May's Guide to Childbirth by Ina May Gaskin MA, CPM. Ina May is the founder and director of the Farm Midwifery Center outside of Summertown, TN. The center has managed over 2,600 births since its founding in 1971 and has documented far fewer labor complications, interventions, and perinatal deaths as compared to hospital births. *
With articulate wisdom, each birth in Gaskin's popular second book, whether easy or complicated, reiterates the reasons for which more and more women are choosing the midwifery model of care:


--Childbirth is a natural process. Not an illness, not an infliction. 
--Your thoughts and perceptions and cultural programming (the stories you hear on TV, from friends, family, your own mother) will all inform how you approach the birth of your own child. It's amazing to note the tangibility of this in the women living on the Farm. They have been exposed primarily to safe, calm and yes even "delightful" home births, and in the end approach their own births confidently and with great adaptability.
--There is pain (burring your hand on the stove, breaking an arm) and there are the cyclical intensely powerful "sensations" of birth. Your attitude, where you choose to birth, and who you choose to have in the room with you are in your hands and can have perhaps the greatest effect on your mindset and bodily reactions. 


       Heidi Rinehart, MD (Obstetrics and Gynecology) and her husband, Rudy, also an MD, decided to birth their first child at 'the Farm' in 1993. On Heidi's thoughts about the traditional hospital culture: "Medicine is a culture all its own; it has its own standards of acceptable behavior and mores. [...] It is unbelievable to me how much beliefs and values of the medical culture influence the "scientific" search for knowledge and impact on its conclusions. Every scientific endeavor is influenced by the beliefs of those who do the work, but this is neither acknowledged nor challenged in medicine. When the prevailing belief is that childbearing is fraught with danger, how could I retain my belief in the normalcy of pregnancy and birth?"

And upon visiting with Ina May and witnessing the midwifery model of care:

"The experience profoundly changed my perspective. In the hospital, I hadn't perceived the anxiety and foreboding that permeated birth until I experienced the impact of its absence among the midwives. The peace, the wonder, and intimacy were infinitely greater. What a compelling difference!" (113)

--Through reading books like this and taking childbirth classes, you can empower yourself to understand the often very predicable sensations of birth
--There are textbook complications that can happen in birth, many of which may easily be handled by an experienced home midwife without the physically and/or emotionally damaging techniques (forceps, vacuum-extraction, Cesarean, etc) that more apt to be used in hospital model of care.*
--The experienced midwife,will always use her knowledge and education to responsibly and promptly decide when the addition of hospital care may be necessary. And sometimes it is.
--A supportive partner (whether friend, family, doula, midwife) who knows when to be tender, available, involved and when to step back can also work wonders in helping to ease the birth process.
--No birth is exactly the same, so there is no need to compare or strive for the perfect pregnancy or birth experience.


*One such example is in the case of Shoulder Dystocia which I will talk about in a later post