QUOTES
from
Spontaneous Creation:
101 Reasons Not to Have Your Baby in a Hospital (Vol. 1)
Author's Note
"Although it is largely U.S. hospitals that are
referred to in this book, hospitals worldwide possess similar childbirth
technology and perform similar scientifically unsubstantiated rituals on women
and babies, resulting in similar high rates of maternal and infant morbidity and
mortality.
"It is not any particular nation's hospitals
but the institution of the hospital that has proved over and over again to be
antithetical to childbearing.
"Some hospitals fly more bright-crimson flags
than others, but all fly crimson flags."
Introduction
"Obstetricians
should be heroes. They should use their crisis-management expertise to save the
day in those rare cases when nature needs culture's help.
"In Western
hospitals today, obstetricians languish in routine obstetric scenarios. The
medical management of the vast majority of births is a waste of doctors' time.
"Asking
obstetricians to use their hard-earned and highly specialized skills to manage
routine births is like asking firemen to spend their days rescuing cats from
trees."
Chapter 1
You want to live.
"It is an unquestioned belief in Western
culture that the hospital is the safest place for women to give birth.
"'Everybody knows' that childbirth technology
has taken the risk out of childbirth. 'Everybody knows' that birthing at home
is a dangerous business.
"One would have to be a Luddite to suggest a
return to pre-technology days, to a time when death's dark horse cast a long
shadow on the human manger.
"But what everybody knows may not be true, and
death rides daily through the modern-day hospital maternity ward. . . .
"If you give birth in the hospital with an
obstetrician, rather than at home with a midwife, you are between 2.9 and 6
times more likely to die. The average risk, while somewhere between the two
numbers above, is hard to pin down because it depends on the figures one starts
with, and these figures are in question. But it's absolutely certain that the
vast majority of women are at least twice as likely to die if their babies are delivered in the hospital.
"When comparisons are made between high-risk
populations attended by hospital obstetricians and similarly high-risk
populations attended by midwives, midwives always fare better. Women labeled
'high risk' by modern-day medical standards somehow become low risk when
attended by midwives. . . .
"Obstetric technology has its place and is
welcome as a backup to natural birth. But if you decide to climb on
technology's horse without true cause, get ready to be taken for a ride."
Chapter 2
You want your baby to
live.
"It is true that
U.S. infant mortality (death of infants in their first year) has decreased
steadily for the past 50 years, and this should be cause for celebration. But
the decline has not been due to advances in birthing technology or procedures. The
decline has been due to advances in public sanitation and maternal health care.
"In short,
advances in public health have been saving babies at a rate faster than the
increasing use of hospital obstetric technology has been killing them."
Chapter 3
You don't want a cesarean section.
"Your obstetrician will feel free to give you a
cesarean for any number of reasons in addition to medical indication.
(Non-medically indicated cesareans are sometimes referred to in this book as
'cowboy cesareans.') . . .
"Is desire for higher reimbursement really the
reason behind the performance of some C-section surgeries? Can it really be
true that obstetricians are willing to sacrifice women's bodily integrity
simply for their own financial gain?
"It can be true and it is true. In 1992 in
Washington State, for example, the cesarean rate at nonprofit hospitals was 20.3 percent, an
extraordinarily high rate by all standards. But the rate didn't match the rate
at for-profit hospitals, which
was 36 percent, almost double the nonprofit hospitals' rate. . . .
"You'll probably agree with Dorothy that
there's no place like home when you read the following: When Total Health Care,
a Kansas HMO, changed its reimbursement policy and began compensating doctors
equally for cesarean and nonsurgical deliveries, the Kansas cesarean rate
dropped overnight from 28.7 percent to 13.5 percent. Without the financial
incentive for cesareans, doctors simply stopped performing them."
Chapter 4
You don't want another cesarean section.
"If you give up your dream of having a VBAC and
submit to a repeat cesarean (obstetricians' silver mine of choice –
second only to the gold mine of first-time cesarean), your chances of dying
increase by a factor of at least 11.5. Ask your doctor if he thinks that's an
acceptable risk for you to take."
Chapter 5
You don't want to hemorrhage.
"If you give birth in the hospital, you are
three times more likely to hemorrhage than if you give birth at home."
Chapter 6
You don't want an
episiotomy.
"Why your
obstetrician thinks your sex life needs improving is beyond this author. But
let's give your OB the benefit of the doubt and assume that somehow he has
correctly identified in you a low quotient of sexual satisfaction. Your
obstetrician claims that he can make your sex life better by slicing your
perineal tissue and stitching it up. If this were true, wouldn't women
routinely undergo the operation at puberty?"
Chapter 7
You don't want
epidural anesthesia.
"One would not
be mistaken to call epidural anesthesia the trunk of a many-branched tree of
intervention.
"These branches
include, but are not limited to, IV placement (to engorge your blood with a
half-gallon of intravenous fluids in an effort to combat the drop in blood
pressure that accompanies an epidural), bladder catheterization (increasing
your risk of infection), Pitocin administration (to stimulate contractions when
your uterus becomes disabled), electronic fetal monitoring, episiotomy, and a
three-times-increased use of forceps or vacuum-assisted traction.
"These
interventions may not sound like much, especially when compared to cesarean
section, but they start to add up when you're the one experiencing the
discomfort, pain, and cost. They also result in other interventions that often
lead to C-section. . . .
"There are
several possible adverse direct physical side effects from the anesthetic
itself. These side effects include, but are not limited to, paralysis of lower
extremities, septic meningitis, cranial nerve palsies, anaphylactic shock,
spinal headache, fever, bladder infection, nausea, vomiting, seizures, urinary
incontinence, dramatic drop in blood pressure, respiratory depression, nerve
injury causing muscle weakness or abnormal sensation, postpartum depression,
hematoma, neurological impairment, severe backache, convulsions, respiratory
paralysis, cardiac arrest, and death.
"Of course,
listing death as a 'side effect' may somewhat understate the matter."
Chapter 8
You don't want your
baby to have birth defects.
"Like many
medical terms, the phrase 'birth defects' is a smokescreen, a blame-layer, and
a lawsuit preventer. While a very few babies do indeed suffer from gene-caused
birth defects, most victims of birth defects suffer from iatrogenic wounding
– which is to say, doctor-caused wounding. High rates of birth defects in U.S. hospitals today are
largely due to routine interventions allowed, directed, and employed by
hospital obstetricians."
Chapter 9
You don't want your
baby to be taken away from you.
"Hospital
indoctrinees insist that newborn bathing is necessary to prevent infection. But
the opposite is true. Bathing washes off your baby's vernix, the protective coating that keeps her body warm
and protects her skin from pathogenic invasion. And many hospitals still use
cold water, a sure-fire way to weaken the infant immune system –
especially when combined with cold hospital air."
You want to bond with
your baby.
"In the
hospital, you have no authority, no power at all, to assure that bonding
between you and your baby will take place. As much as they pay lip service to
bonding, Western hospital staff actually consider isolation and observation 'proper care' for newborns."
Chapter 11
You don't want
someone to deliver your baby.
"The essence of
modern-day obstetrics, passed on like a hot potato from medicult school
doctor-priests to unwary initiates, is me-centeredness. This medical
me-centeredness is pro-technician, pro-technosalvation, and anti-nature.
"The
ideologically monolithic hospital institution cements medical school training,
making it perfectly clear to obstetricians that they are professionally obliged
to reshape natural birth into a medical, usually surgical, and always lucrative
event. (All 'for the good of the baby,' of course.)
"What is a
medical event? It is an event prior to which nature is believed to have failed
and must be compensated for, an event prior to which things are believed to
have 'gone wrong' and must be put right by highly skilled technicians.
"That
technicians' impatience and intervention may be the very cause of things gone
wrong is not part of the hospital clan's mythology. That nature needs time and
quiet and dark and – is it so remarkable? – even love to work its
procreative wonders are concepts that lie outside the mythological bubble of
technological salvation in which obstetrics medicine men and women daily
work."
You don't want your
baby delivered with forceps.
"If a tool
could be invented that would painlessly open the maternal pelvis to a wider
diameter, while at the same time shortening the pelvic outlet, it would be
patented immediately and marketed for millions. Interestingly, midwives already
have such a tool in their sacred medicine bag. It's called squatting. . . .
Squatting is known as the midwives' forceps . . ."
Chapter 13
You don't want your
baby delivered by vacuum extraction.
"Occasionally,
profuse bleeding occurs beneath the scalp of a vacuum traction-delivered baby.
This bleeding is referred to as subgaleal hemorrhage.
"Unlike the
relatively benign (though certainly dangerous) cephalohematoma, this particular
kind of bleeding poses a grave risk to your baby. In the words of medical
researcher Henci Goer, subgaleal hemorrhage is 'life-threatening.'
"In a failed
attempt to reassure their readers about this threat to newborns, researchers
L.M. Chadwick, et al. write: 'While associated with a six-fold increase in
mortality, the long-term prognosis for survivors of [subgaleal hemorrhage] is
good.'
"In other words,
if your baby doesn't die right away from subgaleal hemorrhage, there's a
good chance he won't die later. Virtually
all reported cases of subgaleal hemorrhage are linked to the use of
vacuum-assisted traction."
You don't want your
baby to be stillborn.
"Although
routine hospital interventions put your baby at significant risk of stillbirth,
conscious intervention is not needed to create a stillborn baby. Unconscious,
unplanned environmental intervention – that is, the mere fact of being in
a hospital – is just as effective. Animal studies have repeatedly shown
that environmental disturbances can be disastrous to the fetus during both
pregnancy and labor."
Chapter 15
You want your birth attended by a woman.
"In today's hospital, Homo sapiens plays second fiddle to Machina electra. A woman is never as important as a machine in the
modern-day hospital. And as a rule, it is not persons who 'give care' during
labor, but inanimate objects – some of them alarmingly active and noisy,
as if their creators had made them to imitate life. . . .
"In the hospital, actual creation – you,
a female, creating life in this moment – takes a back seat to
mythological creation: machines engaged in a continuous struggle to standardize
and routinize the great female peacock tail of possibility."
You want your birth attended by your husband.
"Although hospitals today allow husbands in the
delivery room, no hospital in America or on earth will allow your husband to be himself during your labor and birth – just as no hospital on earth will
allow you to be yourself. The mechanized, medicalized mode of modern birth
allows your husband's body, but not his spirit, to be present for the most
profound event of both of your lives."
You want your birth attended by your children.
"Lysol-loyal hospital staff are worried about
the germs your children carry with them, but it is the germs carried by staff
and ever present in the infectious hospital that are truly to be feared."
You want your birth attended by your caregiver.
"If you give birth in the hospital, there is a
one in five chance that your obstetrician will be there for the birth of your
child."
Chapter 19
You want a quick birth.
"The lithotomy position does for childbirth
what tying the feet together does for high-jumping."
You want a personal birth.
"You may believe that, lying on the operating
– sorry, delivery –
table, you can remember that you are a person, an individual, a being, and not
a cog in a great machine. But you will not be allowed to remember. There are no
mirrors in the maternity ward. Your only reflection is in the eyes of hospital
personnel, and they continually blink: defective, defective, defective . . ."
Chapter 21
You want a private
birth.
"Exactly
how many strangers' fingers should you expect deep between your legs as you
labor in the modern-day hospital? The 1999 World Health Organization
publication, Care in Normal Birth, reports that a woman with a low-risk delivery giving birth to
her first child in a teaching hospital may be 'attended' (that is, invaded) by
as many as 16 students during her labor. As the standard vaginal exam is
performed with the first and second finger, that's 32 fingers."
You want a natural birth.
"The inborn female wisdom that says 'remain
upright for birth' is ignored by hospital medical professionals. All women are
placed on their backs – a position convenient for Homo technological but fraught with difficulty for mothers in
labor."
Chapter 23
You want a spiritual birth.
"From sign-in (signing over) to prep to IV
cyborgification to institutional drug dealing to multiple-functionary
manhandling to tool deliverance to infant juggling, the medical model of
childbirth creates a still pond of fear from a vibrant reservoir of joy and
turns the sacred event of childbirth into an extremely well managed, very
entertaining, and largely godforsaken drama."
You don't like pain.
"Western
hospital childbirth is a ceremony of female subjugation and pain at the hands
of institutional functionaries walking a straight male line. The curvy,
emotional, spontaneous female must be 'brought into line.' She must be ordered.
But childbirth cannot be ordered. Childbirth is of itself and comes of its own
time and in its own way. Thus, institutional punishment in the form of pain is
brought to bear. Pain is the alpha and omega of the hospital birth rite."
Chapter 25
You want to give birth in a position of your choice.
"Of all the hospital's methods of turning
persons into patients, placing you on your back is the most effective. The
supine position is the animal position of surrender. Once you have been
convinced to assume this position, once you have signaled your surrender to
childbirth 'experts,' you show your willingness to become an institutional
initiate, to join the community of believers in the myth of technological
salvation. In essence, you show your willingness to participate in this day's
blood sacrifice."
You are not afraid of your pelvis.
"Your obstetrician measures the capacity of
your pelvis by x-raying your bones. Aside from the dubious wisdom of showering
the human body with carcinogenic X rays, we must ask if it is truly wise to try
to determine the size of a flexible-joint opening by measuring the parts of it
that are not flexible."
Chapter 27
You are not afraid of
your umbilical cord.
"It should
also be noted that obstetricians' ostensible concern for umbilical cord
wrapping or knotting is somewhat questionable, since it is obstetricians who
routinely cut the umbilical cord as soon as babies are delivered or birthed.
This gives us the absurd scenario in which an obstetrician, using his hard-won
apprenticeship skills, dexterously unknots or unwraps a baby's already severed
umbilical cord."
You don't want to give birth according to a doctor's
schedule.
"As we have seen, the practical definition of
an obstetrician is not 'one who gives care during childbirth' but 'one who
fears nature.' Your obstetrician is one who views nature as the enemy and acts
accordingly. If nature wants you to give birth in nighttime hours, your
obstetrician believes it is up to him to oppose this desire. As far as he's
concerned, nature is his intern."
Chapter 29
You don't want to please a king.
"It seems that this particular king was
possessed by a strong compulsion to observe the act of childbirth. The good
king did not, however, fancy the skirts-darkened, musky, and oftentimes moist
view from the floor beneath a woman's birthing stool. (And why should a king
stoop so low?)
"Instead, our royal pervert asked a male
physician to convince the ladies of the court that childbirth would be easier
reclining on a high table. 'Easier for whom?' was a question never asked of the
king. In such a time and in such a place, such a question may have left one
with one's head separated from one's body.
"Enter Louise de Valli¸re, an uncurious woman
and reputedly the king's favorite mistress. She was the first woman in recorded
history to give birth on her back with her knees propped up (in what one researcher calls the "stranded
beetle" position), so that her royal lover could witness the birth of what
was presumably their child.
"Gradually, women of the court, and later the
'common' people, copied the fashion of lying down at birth.
"Thus, in the great Western medical tradition
of putting the cart before the horse – indeed, of creating carts where
horses are notably absent – the table came before the need for the table,
and a less than golden egg laid a royal chicken."
You
want your baby to be smart.
"Western babies,
instead of waking to a bright new world, in general find themselves recovering
from the countless routine assaults of hospital obstetrics medicine. While
home-birthed tribal infants are born clear-eyed and clear-minded into a warm,
gentle world, Western babies, dazed by drugs, are yanked, sucked, or pried into
being, then shocked into consciousness by cold air, cold metal, and cold water.
It is no surprise that hospital-delivered babies takes several months longer
than tribal-born babies to exhibit active intelligence."
Chapter 31
You want your baby to
be astrologically correct.
"Speaking of
cesarean section, we must reiterate that it is a misnomer to say that children
delivered by cesarean section are born. Being born is a biological process with specific biological stages.
No baby gives his mother the hormonal signal, 'I want to be delivered by
cesarean section,' and no mother's body responds, 'Okay.' No fetus asks to be
'untimely ripped' from the womb, and no mother wants her womb 'untimely ripped.'
The simple truth is that children delivered by cesarean section are brought
into the world before they have a chance to be born, often without the mother's
informed consent."
You want your baby to
smile.
"Geber's
grant was extended so that she could study babies born to upper class Ugandans, who had just begun to patronize the fancy
maternity wards of newly built European-type hospitals. She found that the
hospital-delivered Ugandan infants, as with their U.S. counterparts, did not
smile until two-and-a-half months after birth. They lay in lethargy, anguish,
or shock in the metallic womb of a multi-million-dollar birth machine, while
their poorer African cousins sucked warm milk from their mothers' breasts,
watched the new sun rise in their mothers' eyes, and turned poverty into
laughter."
Chapter 33
You want to participate in an ancient process.
"Every birthing female must make a decision, on
her own, about what part of the spectrum between culture and nature she wishes
to find herself during the act of creation. If she wants to watch from the
sidelines as her baby is delivered by men with tools, then the road to the
hospital is her road. If she wants to participate in a process in which her
body is allowed its natural and ancient authority, then her path is
inward."
You believe in
nature.
"Does a lack of
science stop, or even give pause to, corporate drug pushers? No. The mindless
infant technology of pharmaceutical 'relief' crawls ever onward toward the
horizon of ever-increasing financial gain, leaving malformed, sick, and dying
women in its wake. . . . Nature, ever silent, does her procreative best in the
pool of poisons introduced by that monster child of greed, modern medicine
(what Elaine Hollingsworth calls 'the sickness industry'). But there's only so
much that nature can do against conscious chemical warfare."
Chapter 35
You believe in science.
"Science tells us, not only that the routine
hospitalization of birthing women has failed to match midwife-attended home
birth in any category of safety, but that it has actually increased dangers to both mothers and babies – sometimes
exponentially. (See Reason #80, 'You don't want to endorse the machinery of
holocaust,' in Volume 2 of this
work, for an in-depth look at the heavy toll taken by the modern-day maternity
ward on emerging human life.)
"There are numerous studies demonstrating that
routine medical interventions routinely and unnecessarily injure, infect,
traumatize, and kill mothers and babies.
"In fact, all studies that compare the two modes of birthing come
to the same conclusion: routine hospital obstetric care is less safe, and in
many cases far less safe, for
parturients and their newborns than personalized home birth midwifery care. . .
.
"No scientist (or anyone else, for that matter)
on earth today can rationally claim that the routine practices of hospital
birth are safe for the vast majority of women and babies."
You don't believe that the female body is defective.
"The doctor's pathological slant instills
immediate fear in the mother-to-be. Her fear translates, as the doctor knows it
will, into a fervent desire to appease the god of technology, a god offered to
her as her only savior. Firmly in the grip of the mega-forceps of modern
medicine, the pregnant woman surrenders her soft, healthy body to the grinding
gears of the birth machine."
Chapter 37
You don't believe in
the male mother.
"As far as most
male obstetricians are concerned, females are incidental to the birthing
process. Males and male-created tools are the true life-givers, the true
creators. Women are just along for the ride. Through the lens of the profound
desire to give birth and the profound fear of the fecund female, male
obstetricians see themselves as rising to godhood even as they throw the
goddess down."
You want to surrender to nature, not culture.
"On the day that your male obstetrician takes
off his pants, lies down on the operating – I mean, delivery – table, and, under the threat of the knife
if he fails, is able to maintain an erection for several hours in full view of
passersby who occasionally don a glove to examine the condition of his
prostate, this author will hail the glories of universal hospital birth."
Chapter 39
You want to feel empowered.
"Natural birth empowerment stories are shared
in low tones across neighborhood fences and sent in a whisper through the thin
ethers of cyberspace."
You want to eat
during labor.
"NPO
["nothing by mouth"] is yet one more example of modern medicine's
century-long endeavor to convince women that their bodies are not their own and
that their powerful fecundity must be manhandled if creation is to occur.
"Starving you to
the point of pain, your hospital obstetrics caregivers will cheerfully show you
their concern by performing further interventions to save you from their
myth-based ignorance – interventions that could have been avoided with a
little research and a will to care.
"But research
requires effort, especially effort of the mind. And effort of the mind is
verboten in the mindless maternity ward, where reason long ago gave way to
myth. And caring requires effort, too – effort of the heart. And the
heart has no place in the modern-day maternity ward, where 'the standard of
care,' not love, runs the show."
Chapter 41
You want to drink
during labor.
"In its efforts
to move several pounds of infant flesh from here to there, the contractile
uterus ripples with massive waves of energy. Charged with the task of pushing
new life onto the shores of Earth, the female body needs water, water, and more
water. But in the hospital, the only water you'll get is at the end of the
sentence, 'Sorry, no water.'"
You're not fooled by
the term "birthing room."
"Hospital birth
advocates say that birthing rooms have come a long way. They say these rooms
offer unusual freedom to the parturient, especially freedom to walk and change
positions during labor. For what more could one ask? When I hear such
statements, I think of the proverbial cannibal's quip: 'We give all of our
victims a piping hot bath and a rubber duck to play with before eating them.'
Birthing rooms' 'freedom to walk' is essentially the freedom to walk into the
arms of technology."
Chapter 43
You're not fooled by the term "informed consent."
"If your obstetrician explained to you the true
risks of medical procedures, drugs, and tests, he would give away the authority
of special knowledge. He would no longer occupy his vaunted position at the
elbow of the gods but would stand eye to eye with his informed client.
"Doctors are understandably reluctant to
surrender their priest-like status: To give up the white-coat emblem of
salvation would be to turn radiant gold into lead. And in the Western
hospital-church today, the alchemy of power is a one-way street. . . .
"To create the "informed" part of
informed consent, an obstetrician would first need to read his profession's
literature, concentrating on articles concerned with risks associated with
routine obstetric procedures. His reading would cut back substantially on
dinner parties and other social affairs, notably gyno-funded golf games.
"Informed to the best of his ability, this
exemplary, rarely teeing-off obstetrician would make a further commitment to
spend a substantial amount of time informing his clients of the risks
associated with every procedure he performed. He would take at least five
minutes per procedure per client to enumerate these risks, and probably much
more time than that to explain these risks in detail, in language understandable
to his clients.
"Thus, an obstetrician seeking to provide fully
informed care to his clients would have to make a paradigm shift from
physician-based practice to client-based practice, from know-it-all to
tell-it-all, from doctor-God to servant of nature, from all-about-Adam to
all-about-Eve. In short, he would have to become a midwife."
You're not fooled by the term "due date."
"You may be surprised to learn that the
conventional medical wisdom that says your pregnancy should last forty weeks
(280 days) is based on, well, nothing at all."
Chapter 45
You're not fooled by the term "high risk."
"To be considered 'low risk' by the modern
obstetrical establishment, you would have to be a nonseparated, nondivorced,
nonsingle female, aged 16-40 . . .
. . . never having received, exhibited, or suffered
from previous miscarriage, stillbirth, premature birth, cesarean section,
bleeding during a previous pregnancy, Rh incompatibility (you being Rh-negative
and your husband being Rh-positive), urinary tract infection, poverty,
malnutrition, obesity, drug addiction, tobacco addiction, alcohol addiction,
emotional instability, unusual stress, anemia, circulatory problems, heart
disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, rubella (during this
pregnancy), tuberculosis, syphilis, gonorrhea, toxoplasmosis, pelvic
abnormalities or cervical abnormalities . . .
. . . and you must never have had siblings, ancestors, or previous offspring
with a genetic defect such as Down syndrome or Tay-Sachs disease . . .
. . . and you must be pregnant with a single (that is, nontwin, nontriplet,
etc.) child that is not a sixth or later child . . .
. . . and, if you are 35 or older, you must be giving birth to a child that is
not your first child . . .
. . . and you must have given birth previously
either to no children or to children under nine pounds or over five-and-a-half
pounds.
"You see how it works. When all risks are taken
together, you find that there are virtually no women who are low risk.
"Wonder Woman couldn't escape modern medicine's
all-embracing, mega-lucrative super-net of risks."
Chapter 46
You're not fooled by
the term "birth plan."
"In the 'do
something, anything' hospital, it is doubtful that your list of negative
preferences – '1) I prefer not to have epidural anesthesia; 2) I prefer not to have my labor induced; 3) I prefer not to have an episiotomy' – will be well
received. It's already assumed
that you don't want an episiotomy. Who does?
"In fact, isn't
your long list of negatives evidence that you believe time-honored hospital
interventions to be frivolous?
Isn't your birth plan evidence that you have no faith in the judgment of
obstetrical experts? How will
this help you as you spread your naked legs wide on the operating –
sorry, delivery –
table?"
Chapter 47
You don't want to
ride in a car during labor.
"A car
ride to the hospital, with its attendant bumps and swerves, is not only
uncomfortable for a pregnant woman, it is a common labor deterrent. Very often
women arrive at the hospital to find their rushes stopped dead in their
tracks."
You want to give birth naked.
"Hospitals require you to wear at all times a
less than trendy, and certainly less than comfortable, hospital gown. Your
beautiful body, your curvy, mammiferous, vulvacious manifestation of nature's
mystery, is not acceptable viewing in the sanctum of the modern-day hospital-church. . . .
"Your desire to give birth naked is both a
threat to hospital order and a direct challenge to the medical view of birth as
a pathological event. True order, in the Western cultural mind, exists only on
a cultural level. Nature is that which is unordered and chaotic and must be
feared. Culture is that which is compelled to order fearsome nature.
"Why precisely must nature be feared? Because
nature, in the medical mind, is pathological. Your body is seen as a car wreck
waiting to happen. . . .
"Your view of your pregnant body as something
glorious to behold, something beautiful, is an idea completely foreign to
pathology-seeking Western medical practitioners. One is as likely to find a
body-friendly doctor in the hospital as one is to find a poet in a frat
house."
Chapter 49
You want to have an
orgasm.
"Although it is
true that women birth in pain in the hospital every day, pain is not the true
nature of childbirth. . . .
"Pain during the
normal functioning of the human body is, very simply, abnormal. Women who give
birth in a state of nature – that is, without cultural interference
– more often than not find childbirth to be a pain-free and even joyful
experience. . . .
"Because there
is nothing private about a hospital birth, there can be nothing sexual about
it. The clinical environment in which most Western women labor today is
completely antithetical to sexual birth. Every one of the myriad technological
interventions that comprise hospital birth comes between a woman and the
natural, body-centric, goddess-given joy of childbirth. . . .
"Society needs
babies to survive, but it has no use for maternal birth pleasure. Physically
pleasurable birth is a threat to the cultural matrix, and it has no place in
culture's bottom-line equations. If a woman is having procreative orgasms, she
is not producing anything or maintaining anything but, like a hot-pink bull in
a china shop, energetically crashing into everything.
"Pleasure in
itself – especially the spontaneous, uncontrolled and uncontrollable
mega-pleasure of female procreative orgasm – is a waste of society's time
and, you guessed it, money. High bed turnover isn't served by a big wet
spot."
You don't want to
experience prolapsed cord.
"Artificially
rupturing the maternal membranes (or 'bag of waters') before the infant head or
body is securely lodged in the cup of the cervix leaves room for the umbilical
cord to slip through before it. This danger does not deter obstetricians from routinely rupturing membranes prematurely. . . .
"Body cavity and
dermal invasion is the trademark of modern medicine in general and of hospital
obstetrics in particular. Medical doctors are taught in medicult school to
challenge the integrity of your body at every opportunity. Medical doctors are
given to believe that they can improve upon your body's workings by breaching
its defensive mechanisms and membranes.
"To improve upon
nature – that is, to 'show her who's boss' – is the fundamental
goal of Western medicine."
Chapter 51
You don't want to experience postpartum depression.
"Herded into hospitals by the twin mythological
cattle prods of the 'danger' of natural birth and the 'safety' of machine
birth, Western women fill to the brim hospital maternity wards.
"Those who survive the onslaught of
state-of-the-art birth technology later fill to the brim psychiatrists'
offices.
"Here men in nonwhite yet still authoritative
coats are happy to prescribe one or more pharmaceuticals to bolster their
patients' mental health and contribute to the ever-widening
bell-tolling-for-thee ripple of Western culture's healthuncare interventions. .
. .
"Since postpartum blues is considered natural in
a technological culture, women experiencing depression after childbirth are not
looked on as crazy, exactly. They are looked on and treated with great sympathy
– much as veterans of foreign wars are looked on and treated with great
sympathy upon returning home.
"The assumption driving this sympathy is that
nature has put women through its toughest gauntlet in childbirth, and that any
woman who survives the gauntlet should be given 'extra understanding' –
or at least a wide berth.
"Of course, the truth is that natural
(intervention-free) childbirth is a profound and beautiful initiation into the
mysteries of nature, not a gauntlet leading to inevitable depression. When
people speak of childbirth as something to be 'gotten through,' it is hospital
birth, not natural birth, to which they are referring . . .
"Western cultural studies show that the risk of
postpartum depression increases, not only when one gives birth in the hospital,
but in relation to the number of interventions performed. The more interventions
a new mother is subjected to during her hospital stay, the more likely she is
to suffer postpartum depression. . . .
"Should it come as a surprise that birthing
among strangers ready to do something, anything, to influence the speed of
labor should result in increased rates of maternal depression? Do we have to be
told by researcher Henci Goer that 'experiencing lack of support and respect
and having many medical procedures during pregnancy and labor increase the
probability of developing postpartum depression'?
"Who wouldn't be depressed to discover that one
is 'unable' to birth one's own child? Who wouldn't be depressed to be separated
from one's child immediately upon its entry into the world?
"Who wouldn't be depressed to find the function
of one's breasts usurped by corporate infant formula? Who wouldn't be depressed
to find that one cannot pick up one's baby because of the pain of abdominal
surgery?
"Who wouldn't be depressed to find that one's
baby's siblings are hostile toward him because they do not sense any connection
between this new creature and their mother – and, therefore, between the
newcomer and themselves?