NaturalChildbirth.org

[Alison]

Fish can't see water
The need to humanize birth in Australia

Humanizing birth means understanding that the woman giving birth is a human being, not a machine and not just a container for making babies. Showing women---half of all people---that they are inferior and inadequate by taking away their power to give birth is a tragedy for all society. On the other hand, respecting the woman as an important and valuable human being and making certain that the woman's experience while giving birth is fulfilling and empowering is not just a nice extra, it is absolutely essential as it makes the woman strong and therefore makes society strong.

But we do not have humanized birth in many places today, including Australia. Why? Because fish can't see the water they swim in. Birth attendants, be they doctors, midwives or nurses, who have experienced only hospital based, high interventionist, medicalised birth cannot see the profound effect their interventions are having on the birth. These hospital birth attendants have no idea what a birth looks like without all the interventions, a birth which is not dehumanized. This widespread inability to know what normal, humanized birth is has been summarized by the World Health Organization:

"By medicalising birth, i.e. separating a woman from her own environment and surrounding her with strange people using strange machines to do strange things to her in an effort to assist her, the woman's state of mind and body is so altered that her way of carrying through this intimate act must also be altered and the state of the baby born must equally be altered. The result it that it is no longer possible to know what births would have been like before these manipulations. Most health care providers no longer know what 'non-medicalised' birth is. The entire modern obstetric and neonatological literature is essentially based on observations of 'medicalised' birth." - World Health Organization[1]

Read more here: http://www.birthinternational.com/articles/wagner03.html
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"The truth shall set you free, but first it will make you mad."

"And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom"

[CFLhomeschooler]

YA
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Child of God my king, wife of a wonderful husband, and mother of 4!

Marital conflict is not husband vs. wife, but husband and wife vs. our common enemy.

[mom37]

well said. It's a crying shame, this medicalized birthing process. I tried my darndest to have a natural birth. After 27 hours of labour with no interventions, it ended in a c-section, and I cried and cried about that. What's worse, I felt completely detached from my baby - it was all so surreal and I couldn't see or feel him being born. I was emotionally scarred from that experience, and it took me two weeks or more to start to bond with him. I wouldn't wish that on any mother.
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WAHM passionate about non-toxic living and babywearing. I love Baby Carrier Wraps & Baby Carrier Slings