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Babycatcher33 is a midwife student and mom who had a beautiful baby girl named Abby last year. But Abby died of unforeseen natural causes, 2 days after her birth…she never cried or fed or got to be held very much by her mother before she went. Who was understandably devastated.

And then, Mom got pregnant again, unexpectedly, and the new baby was due only weeks after the anniversary of Abby’s death. Joy plus terror for nine long months. All of her readers were holding her breath that this baby would be ok.

And she is. Charlotte was born June 22nd to her ecstatic family and is doing just fine.

I love happy endings.

I haven’t yet seen The Vagina Monologues, but I want to. Even more so after seeing this talk by author Eve Ensler.

Ensler and her supporters have used the popularity of the Monologues as a way to fight violence against women. But what I was moved by in this piece is how much it fit with something I have been thinking about lately, about why I want to be a midwife/birth activist.

Ensler describes women and men who have suffered violence, but who have, after grieving, determined to keep that violence from happening to others. Now, I only had a bad birthing experience, and a c/section I didn’t want, and I can’t really compare that to a woman beaten by her husband, or being genitally mutilated, or living under the Taliban (to use some of Ensler’s examples).

But. What happened to me was violence, even if it was done with good intentions, or at least those who did it told themselves that. I don’t believe there were good intentions; I believe there is indifference, sexism, greed, and justification at work in the minds of those who push the c/section rate ever higher in this country. I think those forces had much more to do with what I went through than any real concern for me or for Nathan. And I suffered, if not as much as many women, enough to know that I was hurt, and I grieved, and I had been wronged, and that it should not have happened the way it did.

And that it shouldn’t keep happening, that there was no reason for it to be happening other than those forces–greed, sexism, indifference–that were the worst possible reasons for it to be happening. And I wanted to fight back.

I thought, quite hard, about becoming a lawyer specializing in birth rights and reproductive rights, but I quickly realized that wasn’t my path, wasn’t the skills I had. I had thought about being a midwife before, but felt unworthy and intimidated of the idea. But once I realized the immense need for good midwives to fight for good births, I still felt unworthy, but needed all the same.

It will be humbling to go after this goal; I’m not all that certain of myself. There is a lot to learn, there is a lot at stake in each birth, and I will face bigger challenges than I ever could in my current series of dayjobs. I think about copping out on it now and then, but the pull always comes back. I love birth, I love the power and beauty of it, I love that it is something utterly unique to women. I am angry that sexism in medicine means we still know so little about it, that birth is still considered about as significant as buying a new car in a woman’s life. I am angry that so little respect is given to it, that it only gets seen in our culture in jokes about screaming women and panicked dads and sitcom cliffhangers. I am angry that doctors are painted as the heroes in birth while the woman whose body has done all the work of building and sustaining and birthing the baby is relegated to a supporting character. I am angry that almost no OBs have ever or will ever see a simple, unmedicated, non-crisis birth, that they are not forced to spend some of their time with midwives, sitting calmly and waiting while a woman labors, at the ready but not interfering till she’s needed. That all they see is a vagina in crisis and a baby in danger, that women are nearly erased except as a set of bleeps on a monitor or as an obstacle to the birth itself that has to be patronized and worked around.

I was hurt, and I grieved, and I’m angry, and I want to do something useful and real with my life. There are 8 million good causes to throw myself into, but this one seems to have picked me.

This artist has been around a while, engaged in various forms of artistic activism around birth/parenting and women’s bodies. I really enjoy her cartoon strip blogging as the personification of Hathor, the ancient Egyptian Cow Goddess associated with birth and the milky way.

She talks about a lot of issues, including natural birth, but breastfeeding is a big one for her. And while reading through her archives, it was funny to me how strange and wonderful it would be for women to be able to breastfeed without having to worry about what men (or anyone, but usually men) think. I mean, ok, some men are going to find Maggie Gyllenhall doing this:

arousing. And that will be taken as reason Not to Do It.

But you know…there are idiots with fetishes everywhere. If you tried to police yourself to avoid all of them, you’d never leave the house. If some git thinks feeding a baby the way it was meant to be fed is some kind of come-on, clearly they have mental and maturity issues. They are the ones with problems. I think women who breastfeed should do so wherever they need to, whenever, for however long they think is right. And people who can’t deal should look away, or just grow up already.

Breasts belong to women; if men like them, fine, but it’s not women’s job to tiptoe around the problems guys may have seeing a boob feeding a baby now and then. It’s mens’ job, to keep it to themselves, not to harass her, and stop feeling some sense of entitlement, some right to tell women what they can do or not do with their breasts.

I love this story Frectis tells that she heard from Ina May Gaskin (possibly the most famous midwife in the world!):

She also talked about breastfeeding and told this story of a nurse in California who was tired of the low breastfeeding rates of her hospital at discharge. She linked the low rate to the “necessary” separation of mothers and babies for “assessments” in the nursery. Being clever and knowing the hosptial machine rolls by the mechanics of intervention and you can’t just propose a new protocol based on good sense, she devised a new intervention: mandatory attachment assessment. Now following births, the baby had to remain skin to skin with their mothers for at least 30 minutes following birth so they could be observed for “bonding” before the nursery was allowed to take them. Thirty minutes turned into a lot longer once the babies started nursing. One thing led to another and now the hospital has a sky-high breastfeeding rate.

I mean, it’s beyond stupid that it has to be done this way, but kudos to the brilliant nurse who figured it out.

Even though it’s impossibly far away, I can’t help thinking about what my approach to midwifery and birth education will be. Especially about what I want to teach in childbirth classes. And to any woman who’ll listen to me, really.

I’m not crunchy granola, first of all. Or rather, I am, but not for spiritual reasons. I like organic things because pesticides are bad for you, and torturing animals for hormone-pumped meat makes me uneasy. I like clean water and air, etc. because I enjoy continuing to exist without having to wear an ozone-proof suit to go outside. I like this planet, I think it’s a nice place to call home, and more importantly, we don’t have any replacement ones lined up at the moment. So it’s just plain stupid to make the one we have unlivable.

You do not need to believe in crystals, auras, past lives, Wicca, or any other religious ideas whatsoever to understand this.

You also don’t have to believe those things to be a homebirth and natural birth advocate. I think the science is there, it is tested, and it is logical. I think taking care of the psychological state of a person about to undergo tremendous physical and psychological stress is a no-brainer, quite frankly. Hospitals are the least relaxing and reassuring places on earth, short of the middle of a shopping center, to give birth. And at least most shopping centers have fountains and plants. And a food court, for if you need a giant pretzel to keep up your strength during labor. Now that would have been handy.

We associate hospitals with crisis, with pain and sickness, because that’s what they exist to treat. Birth was only moved into hospitals for the benefit of the doctors, not for the women…in fact, postpartum deaths initially rose when women began birthing in hospitals, thanks to doctors who didn’t understand why it was a good idea to wash your hands after touching a corpse, but before examining a patient.

Anyway. It’s improved now, but hospitals are still the best places to catch some nasty drug-resistant bugs. If you’re sick, or have a labor gone wrong, obviously it’s worth the risk. But if you don’t have to go there, you shouldn’t. And that has everything to do with the research I’ve read, and nothing to do with wanting to birth in the woods to meet my inner goddess. Though certainly, if that floats your boat, great. But that is not what motivates me.

While I was in my third trimester, I was told to do things like drink raspberry leaf tea, walk by the water, picture flowers opening, etc. etc., to make labor hurry up, none of which had any effect and all of which made me feel silly. Plus I hate hot tea. And while the tea was just an unproven but harmless birth-starting legend, the other two were sheer magical thinking; no different from when my mother was told to put an open pair of scissors under her pillow to “cut the pain of labor.”

Now I respect (and as a midwife, certainly won’t gripe about) the idea that some kinds of magical thinking can help some women go into and get through labor. But for me, it added stress; because if I did the magical thinking and nothing happened…well then obviously I wasn’t doing it hard enough. I wasn’t clapping enough and now Tinkerbell was going to die. And actually, I didn’t believe in it, and found it disquieting to be told to do something I thought was crap by people who were my support team. It felt patronizing. It felt like they didn’t believe in me either and so were giving me something to keep me from getting hysterical.

I think there are a lot of women out there like I was, facing birth with uncertainty. Not wanting the Hospital Special, but not really able to muster up the requisite enthusiasm for birth altars and mystic placenta-rituals. Childbirth is very powerful, but also very mundane. There is grunting, sweat, and poop (yours and the baby’s) involved, after all. It is not dignified, and not always particularly spiritual. And even if it is spiritual, the ready-made spirituality you get with a stereotypical crunchy-granola birth sometimes gets in the way of whatever real feelings the mother is having. Or even just her feeling of “screw the placenta, my ass hurts!”

As a midwife, I’d like to be able to honor all my client’s feelings without trying to fit them into any kind of a mold. If they’re spiritual, then I want them to tell me how that affects what they need from me, but not for me to tell them what anything means or should mean. If they’re not, then we’ll just concentrate on the basics; helping create an atmosphere that makes it possible for them to put their whole body and mind into birthing. What I call the Gospel of I’m Here for You.

After all my ranting, I figured, let’s post something happy.

I’ve talked about wanting to become a midwife before, and about the possibilities I see for dignity and beauty and peacefulness in birth that most women in the U.S. never seem to have available to them.

But since pictures tell more than words, here‘s a lovely homebirth by a nice French Canadian couple. I especially like this video because it has less cheesy music and more of the actual labor…and better production values. Most homebirth movies (and yeah, I DO surf Youtube for those, so what?) tend to be just the finale (baby popping out), and underlit, and/or mixed together by someone with a fondness for Bryan Adams. Shudder.

This one has a nice pace without being too long, and it’s just exactly the kind of birth I think most women, deep down, would love to have. I like how the midwife is so chill, just letting the mom do her thing and not being all grabby and poke-y.

I guess I should warn you about nudity…but honestly, it’s a birthing video, and babies come out of vaginas, so, you know, don’t be shocked by that. There aren’t any close-up cooter shots, if that sort of thing bothers you.

Update: more midwifery goodness. A fascinating story about a black midwife in the 50s, and how her family found out she’d been featured iin a famous documentary. More about the 1953 film “All My Babies” here; it was inducted into the National Film Registry in 2002.

I so want to see that!

Several weeks ago, I visited a dr. for the first time in almost a year. My first non-pregnancy-related doctor visit since Nathan was born, really.

It was very mundane, I was there to make sure my cough wasn’t pneumonia after it had been hanging around for over a month. She listened to my lungs, took my history, height, weight, etc. (it was just a regular cough, it turns out).

But when it came time to take my blood pressure, it was high. Really high. They took it three times, and it was higher each time. So after a brief lecture on getting my cholesterol down (though we hadn’t checked it yet, but there was heart disease in my family), she told me to go to several different drugstores on different days and use their blood pressure machines, and write down the readings, if I didn’t think the bp result was reliable.

So I did that…and each time, the readings were lower than normal, as my blood pressure always has been. And maybe it’s medical (and that will get checked out) though weird…and maybe my white coat hypertension has a cause. The last time I was under regular care by a medical professional I ended up screaming at a surgeon who was cutting my abdomen before I was numb.

That kind of memory tends to color your reactions, I think.

And even though this doctor was very nice, and not nasty or judgemental or anything towards me, not male or bigger than me….maybe I’m scared of her. I don’t want to go back and see her again. I need to go to an OB to do the well-woman checkup too, and I honestly don’t know how I’ll get through that.

The last two OBs I saw were after Nathan’s birth, and I was bleeding profusely and more than a little scared that I was going to die. The emergency room OB in Queens was crossly telling me that no, they didn’t know why I was bleeding so much two weeks plus after birth, but it was probably because I’d been overexerting myself. The different emergency room OB I’d seen five days before that in Texas, by the way, told me I was bleeding so much because I had been lying down too much. Either way, mystery bleeding=my fault, somehow.

So that’s one traumatic surgery plus two clueless exams that failed to diagnose a problem that might have been (thankfully wasn’t) life threatening.

I may have some issues.

What made me think about all this was an entry at Niki’s Blog about the uses of bad birth stories–about what they mean in terms of the ways women are treated in the medical culture, and how they shape how women see themselves.

I have to get past my body’s panic response to doctors, because I still need them, much as I wish I didn’t. Just like I have to not mind taking Nathan to the hospital for his surgery, and letting him be handled by people very like the ones who mishandled me. At least he’ll have me there to watch out for him.

It’s hard to figure out, though, how to be unafraid and not deny that I still don’t really trust them. I can’t, knowing what I do. Though I suppose I could trust an individual doctor if I knew them well. The easiness I once felt about going in, getting tested, being examined, though, I don’t think that will come back quickly, if ever.

Even after they’ve been rescued and loved for years and years, dogs that were beaten once still cringe now and then. I think I understand how they feel.

Over at one of the midwife blogs I read, a commenter went off on a rant about her son’s birth; she’d planned a homebirth perfectly, heroically labored for 28 hours without meds, and then her midwife discovered the baby was breech, there was no safe way to deliver him, and they had to rush to the hospital and c/sec. She was devastated, and swore, next time, an OB! To make sure it never happened again!

And I was compelled, as I seem to be by this topic, to leap into the fray. She was hurting, she was angry, and she wanted guarantees it would NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN. She’d done everything right; why had this horrible thing happened to her?

Boy, do I understand that one. And I’ve done my share of thinking what I would do if I could go back and redo Nathan’s birth, protecting myself from the bad things instead of depending on untrustworthy people to protect me.

But as clearly as I can see my mistakes now, I couldn’t then. And if I was in a birth situation again, I would still just have my own brain to rely on, with all its faults. Combine that with the unpredictability of birth and the humanness of even the best midwives and OBs, and you find there are no guarantees. Not one. At home, in the hospital, even with Ina May Gaskin herself attending you, something could go wrong. Homebirth is not any less safe for a healthy mom than a hospital birth*–and if you count the superbugs drifting around hospitals, it might sometimes be safer. Babies die in hospitals too. Ask any OB about surprise breeches…better yet, ask a nurse. They’ve seen it all.

The system we have is more imperfect than it should be, but it can never be perfect anyway. Given that, pregnant women have to understand that giving birth takes courage, toughness, and survival skills most women don’t know they have. Sometimes it may be a walk in the park, or a tough hike up a mountain. Sometimes it may be a deadly battle. You don’t know which you’ll have until the day arrives.

* and if we had a British style system with OBs allowed to support midwives, it’d be even safer.

I’m surfing the internet while Matt and Nathan sleep, listening to our upstairs neighbors, who like to RUN from one end of their apartment to another while stomping their (apparently) heavy shoes AS HARD AS POSSIBLE. Occasionally they drop something heavy from a great height, just to liven things up, or run their vacuum at 11pm. So far they haven’t woken up Nathan, but when they do, I’m going to get him out of bed as he sobs, throw on my robe, and go upstairs to pound on their door and LET THEM HAVE IT. They don’t speak English (we’ve complained before) but I’m pretty sure they’ll get my meaning.

Anyway, I’m having a beer to keep my blood pressure down in the meantime. And I found some new midwife blogs, yay, now in my sidebar. One of them is Frectis. And Frectis has let me in on a little-known fact that, quote,

Long labors bring out the gas in midwives. I don’t know why. One of my friends says its an adrenalin thing. Another said it’s because we freely fart all day long but when you’re in someone’s house you notice it more because you’re trying to hold them in. Maybe we should commission a study. I’ve never been to a birth with anyone who hasn’t been gassy.

See, THAT’S the kind of info you can never get from a midwifery textbook. Yet, so important to know!

A really beautifully-written one too, called El Paso Adventure in Midwifery. She is training at Maternidad de la Luz in El Paso, a place I have considered going to for midwife training; it’s one of the only places in the country with a comprehensive on-site program for CPMs. They do serve a mostly border, Mexican-American clientele, and I would need to learn Spanish first, which is a big barrier for me. But not insuperable, just challenging.

It’s not cheap, and means living in El Paso for one to three years depending on which program you pursue, and I have no idea how that would even work for me and my family. I’ve never been west of Abilene, so that part of Texas is mysterious to me. And a little scary. But unlike some other schools I’ve looked at, it wouldn’t require moving to Oregon or another faraway state; I’d still be close enough to see my family semi-regularly.

And yet still: scary. And a long ways off, if it happens at all.

Still, it feels lucky to have stumbled across the blog of someone already doing this work who can help me see what it might be like. And she catches lots of babies, which is the best part of reading midwife blogs–the birth stories. I’m always looking for new ways to feed that addiction.