Wild Birth Rites

This is Freebirth.

Wild Birth Rites

In the last weeks we free-birthed our newborn at home. Mother. Father. And eventually, baby. There were no scans and no hospital visits. Just us, with trust, all the way, in the natural process of birth.

I am aware that there are many births in Ireland that are the happiest days in the mother and father’s life, regardless of what happened. There are midwives in hospitals that have dedicated their lives to the art of midwifery and they continue to extend themselves to make sure mothers are looked after and babies are healthy. And there are doctors that make calls that save lives.

But this is my experience, inspired by events that I witnessed and observed, and once the can of worms that is birth rites and birth rights is opened in the presence of women, it becomes clear why it is a subject worth writing about.

I suspect articles about birth are the last thing on a new mother’s to do list. They are not in a position to write, and so their story is only ever heard by interested friends and relatives. For other women it seems something is awry, but it doesn’t fully register with them. The scale of the horror. It’s best, maybe, to say nothing and be grateful for the men in the white coats.

Men often tend to take the Billy Connolly line of it not being ‘a spectator sport’, though thankfully not all. Our role is often underestimated, not least by ourselves, and so we offer our support and do the best we can to hold the space.

Six years ago we blinked at the right wrong time in home-birthing for our eldest boy. When trust was needed in the natural order of things, we second guessed ourselves and went to the hospital. Now truth be told when the (off-duty) doctor present in our home insisted we go, I thought it was a fine idea, because hospitals seemed to be good places to give birth. I’ve often felt like I was the weak link in the chain.

So I agreed with the doc and Siobhán asked for her deck of cards. Faith versus science. She wanted to consult with a greater power. I admire that about her. The doctor seemed like the most qualified one in the room to me, but in the intervening years I’ve been exposed, too often, to greater powers to still believe that old story. She called in her guides and the message was clear. Stay the course. Trust in what you have begun. Against his insistence she stayed in the battle for another five or six hours before finally relenting.

In the hospital things started out well until there was a shift change and an obstinate obstetricians came in to the theatre. She wasn’t interested in the natural order, only her own. She hated Siobhan for her strength, and for the challenge she represented to her certainty. We signed a handwritten, 14 point contract that had, at the start of every line, ‘If my child dies......’. Signing it was us taking responsibility. To be clear, this was just for a natural birth. Nothing else. There was no distress. No abnormalities. It was just taking longer than they had allowed for. No one was waiting to give birth outside of the theatre.

After the birth, which went smoothly at every level except where the obstetrician was involved, the battle intensified. They insisted on antibiotics for the 1 minute old baby because he passed the threshold for sepsis, set in Ireland at nineteen hours from the time of the waters breaking, an arbitrary length of time set by an obstetrician and an actuary in some distant office. In France that time is set somewhere around the forty hour mark.

So I ended up employing skills honed on the hurling field to protect the essential bond between newborn and mother, crouched with my arms out, stopping the paediatrician from taking the baby to a different room immediately to inject him. The obstetrician was disgusted and Túsla were called. I was later informed that the garda could be called and I would have no choice but to relent on the injections. As I understand it, the government, through the Children First Act a few years previously, had nestled themselves neatly between me and my newborn, they were the arbiters of what was best for our son.

We stayed the course, resisted their harassment for two whole days, relented, were talked out of giving it to him by a sympathetic nurse and then, after satisfying Túsla’s embarrassing enquiries, I ran four miles out of town to thumb a lift home. By the time I was picked up, tears of joy rolled down my face as I was overcome by the beauty of a briar in the winter frost as the enormity of the moment of having a son finally came in. A friend picked me up, I went home and got the car and collected my two babies. That’s the short version of the story but that’s the nub of it.

Our second was straightforward. Placenta previa, a C-section and total gratitude for the marvels of medicine when there is a problem that needs an intervention.

We were blessed with our third child on International Women’s day.

This time, when the time to trust came, we stayed the course. At 8.40 a.m. he arrived, after an arduous labour that left nothing to the imagination, healthy, strong, settled. Siobhán had been through a battle and needed healing. I had been emotionally disconnected in some respects throughout the birth, aware the kids were sleeping in the next room, making sure the house was warm, the sheets were dry, the towels and the sheets were changed. The mechanics of the situation were in my hands and rightly or wrongly, my body chose to engage in more masculine tendencies, despite my awareness that there were births where the man was toe to toe with the woman in feeling the whole experience. I didn’t chose it to be that way, for about three days before the birth it seemed to be choosing me.

But I was out on limb and I needed to be held too. In the moments after birth Siobhán was lying in a pool of blood with our boy in her arms and though we had medicines available, I needed a dig out. So we called our friend, a birth keeper and campaigner for home-births, who lived an hour and a half away. Before she came to assist us, she talked us both in to a necessary settledness that allowed us to rest our hearts in to the moment. She came with food and with care and with the sureness that Siobhán’s intuition was the still the biggest story in town and she had to continuously trust that, tune in to it and act from that place. Without her we might have been under pressure to finish the job.

Siobhán had had a gathering two weeks before the birth where twenty caring and capable women got together and she left with prayers and blessings, but also with a box of different natural cures for the variety of complications that can come up in birth.

Good women.

Anytime there was a problem, the remedy was at hand, though it was still the birthkeeper’s assertion that trust in instinct was the most important thing to follow.

This is communal birth, though we have a ways to travel on that, because our friend came from an hour and a half away, and realistically, for such a common and significant phenomenon, there could be a hundred women between us and her with the same skills.

I want to break from events here to explain something of the reasoning, outside of past experiences as to why I, at least, was in this situation. The question must be ‘why?’. Why, as a man, go along with a free-birth? Why trust Siobhán’s intuition to go it alone.

It’s a story of a hunter that lived in the woods, alone. And everyday he would go to the woods to collect from his traps and collect wood from the forest. One day, on his return, he noticed smoke from his fire and when he went in, there was food ready on his table. This happened three days in a row before he left as usual, in the morning, but instead of assuming his duties, he hid in the woods and watched the house. After midday a fox went up to his door and went inside, took on human form and began to clean and cook and prepare the space for the hunter. He went to the door, knocked, and he was greeted by a beautiful woman, who said to him ‘I will be your wife now’ and the case was closed. They lived happily in the cabin for some time before the man began to get irritated by the woman, and he focused his dissatisfaction on the smell of vixen in his cabin. Eventually he communicated his distaste and she calmly walked to the cellar, picked up her fox pelt and the last he saw of her she was once again a fox, running in to the bush.

John Moriarty introduced that story to me and his following line is what drew me in. ‘I want that to be my E=MC2’ he said. The man in the story was no longer able for animal nature inside of himself. The feminine came to his door and he welcomed it in, but he wasn’t able for it. He couldn’t surrender to wild, feminine instinct. There is a part of me that didn’t want to engage in what I went through last Sunday. The same part of me that doesn’t want to deal with compost toilets and shite and someone else’s innards being in my face. But like Moriarty, I want the story of the fox and the hunter to be my E=MC2. To be able for animal nature, internal and external. And that’s what we entered into together, myself and Siobhán. Her reasons were very different to mine, but that’s why I put my full trust in her instinctive decision to bring our boy in at home.

I don’t wear it as a badge, elated as I was to guide my boy on his final descent. Free-birthing is a serious movement in the country and although we assumed the responsibility of it for our child, I understand it’s not for everyone. It’s an intimate thing, birth, as intimate as it gets, so it’s understandable why women don’t want strangers staring at them under fluorescent lights as they embrace the animal inside of themselves. Like making love or going to the toilet, something in the performance is lost while being observed in a cold and calculated manner. Some of the ideal conditions for birth, the fundamentals, are low lights, an intimate setting, in the safety and knowingness of the biome of the home, no unnecessary talking, particularly talk that keeps the mother in her intellectual self. It’s a merging with animal nature, and the body takes over. One sequence is initiated through the release of chemicals in the body that in turn feed the next process, and so on. Any unnecessary intervention at any stage doesn’t just upset that stage, but it affects the processes to follow as well.

Many birth stories start with gratitude for the doctors intervention, certain as they are that a life was saved, but according to the birthing centres around the world, the intervention can cause more problems than it resolves. I don’t know this. It is what I have read from places that have C-section rates of 2% versus the national average in Ireland of 32%, as high as 70% in some hospitals. Those who choose a C-section are as entitled as anyone to make that decision, it is their free will and I feel little judgment towards them. There are also necessary C-sections, as was the case with our second.

I am responding to the numerous women that I have spoken to, or heard in conversation with Siobhán, who were frightened into having C sections and other procedures (one woman despaired that her womb was taken out without her knowledge and still unsure of the necessity of the intervention) despite their instincts telling them that it wasn’t unnecessary. It’s easy to imagine this happening as health descends down the road it’s going. All decisions that are made with insurance and the bottom line of a hospital in mind are subject to this possibility. It is unavoidable.

There are a lot of women who are unhappy with this. Women appear frustrated that the model is, at it’s core, a masculine version of what is clearly a feminine process.

Mná Chabhair, mid-wives, who are trained in classical methods of midwifery are frustrated that they are increasingly falling under the economy of medicine in terms of what they can do in different situations. Despite being trained to deal with specific problems, they are left with no option but to refer to the hospital as their licence to practice hangs in the balance. Why can’t we speak freely about this? Why is it smoke and mirrors and late night calls under a blanket of secrecy when women need support the most?

So we have the free-birthing movement. Women who chose to follow what is for them, the safest option. They are unwilling to be subjugated by the medical system and they seek a different way. They are being left, somewhat by choice, to go it alone, with trusting, but potentially fearful partners. Doula’s, along with some rebel mid-wives, seem to be the only ones willing to risk it all instead of leaving couples to risk it all themselves. And a risk it is. That’s the crux. One has to be willing to take responsibility for all of the outcomes. We knew there was a hospital nearby. We knew that we might find ourselves in need. But we chose self responsibility and the law of nature ahead of sub-contracting out our most intimate experience.

My tendency towards the middle path leaves me wishing that the hospital model was revised. A birth is not a medical procedure.

Proper birth-centres, that have the freedom to create the intimate conditions necessary for birth are essential, with input from midwives committed to the naturalness and the wildness of birth given it’s due. The mother must be at the heart of these birth centres, with international best practice considered, that encompasses not just the actuary and the doctor, but also the great facilitators of birth, such as Ina May Gaskin and Michel Odent. These can be close enough to a hospital that everyone can feel relatively relaxed.

But though the birth centre model is necessary, provisions must also be made at a community level for birthing in the home. That is a fundamental right of all families if they so choose, because it is best physiological practice.

The tendency may be there to judge us, to judge the free-birthing movement, but our awareness of the importance of these earliest experiences and how it impacts us on our journey through life is the instinct that we follow. To do the best by our children. The same as anyone else. It is for the love of something, and not the rejection of something else, that we do it. We know enough now to know that antibiotics for a newborn play long-term havoc on the microbiome, and the biome is essential to human health. We know, as we just did it, that women that have had a C-section for one child can birth naturally on the next child, despite the hospitals assertions to the contrary. I could go further in to the chaos and corruption of the hospital model, but I’ll leave it there for now. Check out Siobhán’s article on Cassandra Voices for a more visceral description and well rounded knowledge of birth.

If you are triggered by aspects of this piece, it may be that you are carrying birth trauma. Or you may have borne witness to the immensity of medicine, lives may truly have been saved and you may have been left, as I was after Ériú’s birth, in awe of what hospitals can do. So this may appear reckless. Part of me agrees, but a deeper part of me, a more settled, less fearful and more instinctive part, is more convinced now by the majesty of Siobhán in her courage and trust. The feminine instinct seems to carry something that can’t be measured and can’t be boxed in. It is this energy that I want to celebrate and acknowledge.

Maith sibh mná feasa, cróga ag cruthú sean-bhealach nua.

Le ghrá

Diarmuid.