What We Know and Science Proves About Birth

Birth is a healthy normal physiological process that is social as well as personal
Birth is designed to work well
Birth is governed by a woman’s sexual hormones and deeply affected by her state of mind
Birth is also affected by the environment around the woman
Birth can be the most empowering experience of a woman’s life; it can also produce trauma and suffering
Birth needs protection from outside interference – except when there is a true medical need
Birth benefits from privacy and low light for the right natural hormones to be released in the woman’s body
Birthing women are “porous” and hormonally extra-sensitive: how people act and speak in a woman’s presence during labor or within her hearing, can create fear and self-doubt and even stop the labor or alter the baby’s heart rate
Birthing women need to feel secure and safe: most often they desire someone with them who feels comfortable and familiar, like a good mother figure (though it can also be a man or a young woman)
Birthing women as well as complicationsBirthing women often need simple cues (a gentle touch or some massage, or a kind phrase, such as “Your are doing beautifully, and your baby is too”) in order to release tension and allow their body to do its work of stretching, thinning, opening the cervix and helping the baby move down the birth canal and out
Babies are fully conscious during birth and afterwards
Babies are very sensitive to pharmaceutical drugs, and when drugs are used in labor they will stay in the baby’s body much longer than they remain in the mothers, and can have negative effects on that baby’s breastfeeding, bonding and brain development
Babies remember birth: they are recording every bit of the experiences in their brain and nervous system
The body remembers and when there is emotional/physical trauma it affects that child and women until it is released
What happens to us in birth – as the baby and as a birthing woman – affects us, sometimes for the rest of our lives
Midwives are the specialists in normal birth, doctors are specialists in drugs and surgery; most women and babies don’t need a doctor to have a safe, successful birth
Most women can safely birth at home or in a birth center; very few need a hospital
Drugs and surgery are only needed for a small number of mothers and babies
Cesarean surgery for birth deprives a baby of important experiences and gut enzymes: cesarean also carries serious risk for both the woman and the baby, immediately and in the years to come
Every medical procedure and drug, especially drugs to induce or speed up labor, can complicate labor and affect the mother and baby
Every mother and baby, father and family benefits from the most natural birth possible
Babies are born aware and conscious but physiologically very immature, so they need special attention and care for the next months, until they learn to walk
Babies – all babies, and women too – benefit physically, developmentally and psychology from months of breastfeeding and being in close physical contact for much of each day
Babies, for the 1st 4-6 months, need only breastmilk (nothing else, not even water) to properly develop their brain, gut, immune system, jaw and teeth

Birth Today

There have been many positive changes in Western European, Australian-New Zealand, and North American birth culture since 1975. That was the year when a major U.S. publisher published a book by an unknown American woman named Suzanne Arms called Immaculate Deception: A New Look at Women and Childbirth. Arms’ book and Birth Without Violence, by French obstetrician Frederick LeBoyer both hit the bookstores in May. National television appearances followed and word of mouth spread quickly. The labor and delivery units of American hospitals, and hospitals all across Europe and Australia-Asia, and South America felt the jolt.

The public, previously willing to follow doctors’ orders about everything related to birth, was beginning to wake up from a long, numbed slumber. The first landmark book about birth for the general public, British physician Grantly Dick Read’s Childbirth Without Fear, was published in 1944, the very year Suzanne Arms was born to a mother who’s legs were held together until the doctor arrived and who was then separated from her baby for a routine three days and told not to breastfeed, because she was a modern woman. Read’s book shocked his medical peers in England who, for the most part, believed that modern women had to be sedated, narcotized or drugged unconscious for their own good and so that doctors could deliver the baby.

Enthusiasm about one scientific and medical advancement after another left the medical profession feeling unprecedented confidence in their ability to conquer unpredictable Mother Nature and hand squalling newborns into the hands of fathers who waited and paced in rooms down the hall. Doctors, hospitals, drugs, episiotomy, forceps and cesarean surgery were making birth better and safer for everyone. Dr. Read went against a hundred years of Western culture’s belief that modern women were simply incapable of birthing naturally. He disagreed with popular opinion that the only safe place for birth was a modern fully-equipped hospital under the guidance of a doctor. Physicians had begun to pressure and lure healthy birthing women into hospitals after in the years following World War II. Surprising, once women got used to the idea there was no public outcry. Fewer and fewer of them had any memory of the births of their children and they too now believed this was for the best, as was modern formula to feed these babies on a schedule.

Childbirth Without Fear inspired a handful of “uppity” women in England to begin educating other women about the value and potential of natural childbirth. A tiny grass-roots movement of these college-educated women began and spread to the U.S. and other countries and continents, launching a new profession for women – birth educators. But it did not catch on for decades, because women trusted their doctors more than their bodies and the horror stories about un-medicated labor spread faster than the stories about the ecstasy possible with natural birth.

Hospital birth, particularly in the United States changed very little, from 1915 until the mid-1970s, when “consumers” —read that women—began to read about birth, and started questioning their obstetricians, and making demands that hospital policies change. That birth was able to continue for so many years unwatched and unquestioned by the public in large part due to the fact that midwives in North America were barred from working in hospitals and that midwives (always women, and largely apprenticeship trained) practicing in hospitals in other countries were under the thumb of obstetricians (almost always men and university trained) were not there to act as advocates for the woman and baby. Labor and delivery rooms were set up for the comfort and convenience of nurses and doctors performing medical and surgical procedures, not for the comfort of laboring women or new mothers and their babies.

In the intervening quarter of a century there has been a dramatic increase in knowledge about birth and babies, and about the nature of human consciousness and how our nervous system and brain form and record the earliest experiences of our lives. The “consumer” movement, led by birthing women and mothers, mushroomed from the mid to late 1970s and into the early 1980s.

Women began to read the same scientific literature that physicians read, sometimes the literature physicians didn’t bother reading. They had scientific evidence from a growing number of studies that proved that natural normal physiological processes in birth carried far less risk than medical intervention in birth for the vast majority of mothers and babies.

Women were beginning to question everything—intravenous drips, routine induction of labor, hospital policies that prohibited women eating or taking fluids by mouth in labor, forced them to wear hospital gowns, lie on their backs in bed for labor, and with their legs in metal stirrups and hands in handcuffs, so that they could not touch the doctor’s sterile field and their emerging baby, for birth.. They questioned the validity of every drug and each hospital routine. They wanted to labor and birth in whatever position felt comfortable to them. They wanted no public shave and enema upon admission, no episiotomy and didn’t want their babies to go to the nursery for “observation” or to be given bottles of sugar water. They wanted their babies in their arms after birth, not across the room under artificial lights in warmers. They didn’t want anyone separating their babies from them and realized that anything that doctors and nurses had to do for a baby could darn well be done with the baby in the mother’s (or father’s) arms.

This minority of women knew what they were talking about and had science to back them up. And for a very brief few years they bent hospital rules so far that it seemed as if the public were taking over the labor and delivery units—bringing friends and relatives, turning labor into a respectful experience that honored women’s work, the sacredness and effort of the baby’s journey, and made the postpartum hospital stay a family occasion.

In a growing number of hospitals today the effects of that revolution can still be felt. Many women are blessed with the fruits of the work of the women before them. Many can now can labor supported by their partners and family, and birth and recover in the same room. The décor of the labor and delivery unit has undergone a much-needed face lift in many hospitals. That is not all. Seven percent of all births in the U.S. are now attended by midwives and the number is quietly growing. There are now more than one hundred birthing centers across the United States, most staffed, and some owned, by midwives. Hundreds of midwives (some nurse-midwives, others direct entry midwives) are once again handing down wisdom about natural birth at home to the younger generation, sharing the knowledge of how to give birth normally and how women can help each other be less afraid and trust their bodies, their babies and the natural process. Some fine films and videos have been made of home births, as well as natural births and vaginal births after cesarean in hospital and in birth center births. Parents today, and their friends and relatives can see what they are like, and with the number of books on the subject to choose from, they ought to be able to make more informed decisions and have more choices.

Yet despite all this, despite all the childbirth books that have been written, despite all the birth conferences that have been held, and the television sitcoms that include home birth, it is surprising how little has really changed. In fact, women in North America—especially the U.S. —are more afraid of birth than ever before and with good cause. The U.S., the richest country in the world, the country that spends at least twice as much on birth as any other country in the world, has some of the worst statistics. The highest cesarean rate in the “developed” world, the highest percentage of prematurely born and low-birth-weight babies, and among the highest rate of infant mortality. Complications surrounding birth have risen steadily in the last few decades and breastfeeding problems have increased, with fewer than one baby in 5 fully breastfeeding at six weeks of age. And fewer than 10 percent of women in North America today experience a straightforward, normal natural birth.

The information about birth that was lacking before 1975 is readily available. Yet information has not created positive changes in physician practices or hospital policies. In fact, many would say things are rapidly getting worse. Without an appreciation of the natural process or an understanding of what dangers medicalized birth poses for millions of mothers and babies, women are demanding to be anesthetized for labor. New parents watch, without protesting, as their babies are taken to intensive care nurseries to be “observed” or treated with invasive procedures and drugs because of interventions done to the mother in labor. Families leave the hospital just hours after birth, when mothers should be resting, and women go home to neighborhoods where there is no one home to help them in the first critical weeks with their new baby. Women in the U.S. are worse off than women in any other modern country, for they receive no postpartum care in the home whatsoever. Unless they can afford to hire a postpartum doula. To top it off, more and more mothers go back to work within three to eight weeks of giving birth – by choice as well as by necessity – and their infants have no choice but to accept early and prolonged separation and maternal deprivation as a fact of life.

Unfortunately for mothers and newborns, family and cultural ties today are stretched thin, often to the breaking point. Little in our modern machine-and money-driven culture supports the developing bonds of love and the healthy interdependence so necessary during and after birth. And although more men are doing their part to help their partners and babies, many of them are unsupported in the vital role of fathering.

Despite all of this, many women today have more options possible for birth, should be more hopeful, less fearful, and more confident than ever before. The problem for them is not a lack of information or option, but a lack of awareness. All across the world birth is becoming more and more mechanized and insensitive to the real needs of birthing women, new mothers and families, and babies. But that is not the whole story. And you who read this do not have to let this be the nature of birth in your family. Read on.

For a lot more about this and dozens of other topics related to childbirth, read Suzanne Arms’ Immaculate Deception II: Myth, Magic & Birth (which was named a New York Times ‘Best Book of the Year’).

Some of these topics include:

Childbirth from the beginning

Your Sister Has a Baby Girl—A fictionalized account of birthing in a healthy tribal culture
How childbirth has changed since ancient times
The problem with birth today
Women, childbirth, and the history of doctors, medicine and obstetrics
Your Sister Has a Baby Boy—A fictionalized account of an urban birth in the U.S. in the mid-1800s

The origins of modern childbirth

How religious beliefs and practices have shaped birth women’s experiences
The demise of the traditional midwife
Modern midwifery in the U.S.

Advancements in obstetrics: a balance of benefits and risks

Non-interventive aids for childbirth—keeping birth normal and natural safely
Hospitals and birth
Your Mother’s Two Births—A fictionalized account of birth in the U.S. in the 1960s and beginning of the age of technology in birth
Birth and drugs—a history
The age of the electronic fetal monitor
Ultrasound and childbirth
The cesarean epidemic
Intensive care baby units—a history of the hospital nursery and ICU
Midwives and doulas in the hospital
Safety Issues

Alleviating fear and self-doubt

Does normal, natural birth matter?
Coping with pain and the unknown
Drugs in Labor and birth—nature’s pharmacy Vs chemicals
The importance of privacy in birth
Making the hospital a safer place for birth
Handling problems and emergencies in birth

How to preparing yourself and your partner for the best possible birth

Birthing centers
The debate about midwives: an ugly story of power and money
The modern doula—woman’s labor companion
The ecology of birth and future of our species

The care of babies before, during and after birth

The paradox: how we are separate yet dependent, resilient yet vulnerable
The newborn baby’s first task after birth
Babies and their feelings, sensitivity and awareness
How babies develop trust

Fear-based, just-in-case obstetrics and newborn care

The personal politics of how you feed your baby
Attachment and attachment disorders in modern society
What has changed in the last thirty years? And what must change
A blueprint for the future of maternity and newborn care

All About Birth