Her Screed

“You want to go into the most intense physical experience in your life unprepared? That doesn’t make any sense to me,” she said. “I thought, OK, let’s get to work. I wasn’t expecting someone else to get the baby out of me.” Gisele Bundchen (I got the quote of a fun blog I was just introduced to "Confessions of a Judgmental Hippie")

Gisele put that beautifully. I feel strongly about birth and about my part in it as a woman. You may say "duh" to the idea that my part as a woman in birthing a child, it is almost laughable to think that a woman doesn't have a part in birthing her child but it is the last part of Gisele's quote that really caught my attention "I wasn't expecting someone else to get the baby out of me." There is a prevailing attitude that doctors deliver babies. Deliver them, you know like a rescue mission of some kind, deliver them like they are prisoners inside their mother's womb. There is a prevailing attitude that women need to blindly trust doctors and the doctors believe they are the experts on all things women and baby, even if they happen to be males and as such will never actually be able to fully understand pregnancy or the birth process.

Now before anyone gets their panties in a bundle I will state that I know that doctors have a specific job that they are very good at and that is to deal with emergencies and abnormalities, they are trained to deal with it and are good at it. Emergencies and abnormalities. Babies are not emergencies, you have months to get ready for them and they are not abnormal, babies have been birthed for thousands of years.

It isn't even the fact that it is doctors but the fact that women expect doctors to just take care of things, look to them to "get the babies out of them" and then are grateful and owing their child's birth to a doctor when in all reality there is no one but a woman that can house and birth a baby. I think it is that attitude that leads to the laziness and the lack of prep work on the part of the woman. It is riding right at the top of the list of the most physically taxing, mentally challenging, emotional experience a woman will go through. When those lines appear it is time to go to work. Because no one and I mean no one is going to birth that baby but you.