Posts Tagged ‘birth experience’

• Planning a freebirth experience

  Date: 2011.03.16 | Category: Unassisted Childbirth | Response: 6

  This is a guest post from Issa.  Issa’s life is full of babies right now. At her homestead in Tennessee there are new baby chickens, new baby pigs, and a baby human on the way. You can read all about her adventures as a hippie-freak homesteading soon-to-be-mama at LoveLiveGrow.com.

  I’m pregnant with my first child, and sometime in May I’ll be having a freebirth – that is, I’ll be at home, surrounded by my partner and friends with no medical personnel in sight. Freebirth, also called unassisted childbirth, is a fringe choice. I live in the US where around one percent of birthing women give birth at home, usually with a midwife. The numbers for freebirthing women are even tinier. An interesting question that arises then is what leads a woman to choose this, and more to the point, why have I chosen it?

  

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• Does the “birth experience” matter?

  Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: Birth | Response: 13

  People who are committed to having a “natural”, or medically unhindered birth often prepare for this in great detail in the months leading up to their baby’s arrival into the world. Steps that are likely to make what is commonly referred to as the “birth experience” more pleasant as well as safe are undertaken by many. Birth is certainly an experience, but I am not sure I like this term much, unless the experience is specifically being discussed, as opposed to the physiological process of birth. Why? Medicalized birth advocates frequently claim that for mothers opting to give birth at home, or without certain routine medical interventions – simply put, women who want a “natural birth”, whatever that may mean – the “birth experience” is more important than the needs of their baby. This claim is, in my opinion, groundless and ridiculous.

  The events that take place during labor and birth, and the immediate postpartum period, can and do have long-term implications for many women. There is no need for medical birth folks to be so cynical about this fact. Indeed, being in labor and giving birth is about having a baby. But how women perceive their own births matters. Choices matter. Physical autonomy matters. Respect matters.

  

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