About Childbirth

New Year's Eve 2008, I found out i was expecting, certanly not a news i expected, but nontheless that filled me with a sense of accomplishment as if was fnally happening what i had long dreamed and longed for.

I Immediately started researching, with internet at my disposal and being out of work i had the time, albeit a few worries, to enjoy my pregnancy. I read a lot, and loved Michel Odent's Birth without violence. It says in short that the baby grows in a humid, peacefull muffled world and is brought foward in a cold litten harsh atmosfere, taken from his/her mother and left to cry.

I knew that was not what i wanted for my baby, but how to achieve it? I read more and more, whatched birth videos and saw from the one that births without uttering a sound to the one that screams: "get IT out me". Then red some more i learned of the terrible consequences hospital protocol procedures can have in the baby, the mother and the bond between them. I learned about the hormone cocktail involved in birth and the notion that human being are still mammals and therefore birth better in quiet, half-litten and untouched. Try to stare at a cow giving birth and you will hinder her process...

When I presented my western minded OB-Gyn with my "birth plan" not wanting hormones, drugs, episiotomy, and wanting to birth squatting he looked at me with disbelief and uttered "how do you expect ME to work?" to which i though though didn't reply "and I though I was going to be the one doing the birthing" nope, not in the western world. Here, Woman are systematicly told to distrust their bodies, to fear childbirth. I knew at that point I needed another approach. I was not about to let someone else decide my experience.

Thankfully i found wonderfull people to allow me face up against myself against all my beliefs and start to act upon them That is how birth empowered me. And that's the battle I had to face when delievering: no one was going to do it for me, i had to do it by and for myself and believing in me.

From then on I think I have understood michel odent words "if we want to heal the world we must first heal how we come into it" by non inflicting violence in other (specially mother and baby) we can guaranty a generation to which inflicting violence is unthinkable...

I attach a link to a slideshow i did in collaboration with my OB and Doula. It has 2 parts, This is the link for the second