I am driving down to Olympia tomorrow for Part 2 of my “Deepening into Birth” training. I’m excited to be spending 3 more weekends learning about birth, both from a physiological viewpoint and from a spiritual perspective.
Our teacher, Whapio Diane Bartlett, has been a midwife for over 27 years and worked intensively in Christian and Mennonite communities, where our mainstream medical paradigm was not part of the birth culture. She learned from these mothers, many of whom already had 4-5 or more children.
She sat. She witnessed. She saw how these women instinctively knew how to birth–and how easily most of the births happened when there was no interference by the midwife. If she was needed, she was there to assist, but most of the time her skills weren’t required. The mothers knew what to do.
In a nation with a caesarean rate of over 30% and a very high infant mortality rate for a developed country, we may want to look deeper into birth and start questioning some of our assumptions.
I’ll be writing more about this in future posts…