The Spirituality of Birth, Home Birth and Community Midwifery

— Judy Luce, Midwife
presented at the Luddite Congress held in Barnesville, Ohio, in the early 1990s

I’ve never sung outside the shower alone, but since being asked by Scott to come to this Congress a refrain has been going round and round in my head and my heart that speaks to the ground on which I stand as a midwife and the Spirit that informs my life and my work:

“Song in our silence, light in our darkness,
Water of life for our thirst.
You are the freshness of birth every morning,
The grace that encircles our days.”

I am a lay-midwife — a community midwife, and have been working with childbearing women and their families attending births at home for nearly twenty years. I am apprentice trained. In the deepest sense birth and the childbearing experiences of women were my teachers — not information about birth, but the experience of birth, the awesome physical and spiritual and cosmic unfolding of birth with its natural and varied rhythms and expressions. I learned this in the context of family and community. I learned this in a seeking community of women who desired to support normal birth, and preserve natural birth and the possibility of home birth for families — in all its spiritual and social dimensions.

I am proud to be a “lay midwife.” George Bernard Shaw says that all professionalization represents a conspiracy against the laity. I would say “professionalization” disempowers and is an expression of market control — service and journeying-with become product. As a lay midwife I honor where the most essential wisdom and knowledge of birth lie — not in science and technology and medical definitions, but in women’s body, in the flowering of the natural birth process, in the language — the poetry and the metaphor and the stories — that grow from experience, and in the natural world of which human birth is a part. I honor the reality of birth and trust its process. I see taking responsibility not as taking control but as being responsive to the nature and unfolding of the event. It is a dance in which we are shaped by the music and asked to interpret it.

As a midwife I walk with women and families and support them and the birth process by my watchful presence, by listening and by teaching. I experience midwifery as a calling, a vocation not just to assist women in childbirth, but to speak from the mountains what I SEE. I view myself as a cultural worker and a storyteller who helps to preserve the culture of natural and women-centered birth by reflecting upon its meaning and helping to transform the larger society through the witness of birth and the retelling of the stories that embody in their narrative what is being preserved and what is being destroyed and lost. I see the practice of midwifery as a way of protecting women and birth against the colonization of their bodies and birth by invasive and altering technologies and the violation that accompanies unnecessary cesarean sections.

A few years ago I saw an aerial photo of the Netherlands at the time it was being threatened with massive, wide-spread flooding. I’ve always been intrigued by the Netherlands with its dykes and the many childhood stories to which they gave birth. But only with this aerial photo did I really grasp what the dykes were about and what it meant to live below sea level. That night as I lay in bed I was overcome with the realization that most of what I believe in and value most lives below sea-level.

Of late I’ve come to realize how much of my life is consumed maintaining dykes, keeping fingers in the holes that keep springing up, being kept paralyzed in a defensive posture against the continuing threat — so much so that I lose sight of the world within the dykes, the life and way of life they protect. What is this “dyke work?”

keeping up on the new technologies researching and critiquing and protesting them. fighting legal battles associated with the attack on midwives and homebirth and the introduction of regulatory legislation. resisting the cooptation and control of midwifery by the medical system. fighting the out-of-control, unregulated growth of the birth machine with its invasive technologies from genetic screening to test-tube babies to electronic fetal monitoring and elective and unnecessary cesarean sections.

The forces that threaten worm their way into our hearts and come to define who we are as well as the terms of the debate in our quarrel with the world. I correct and critique and protest and defend (build and maintain dykes), and the story is silenced.

The growth of these technologies, their critique and their long-range, far-reaching implications could be the subject of a whole conference. Today I would like to focus on the story, the heart of my life — midwifery, home birth and the power of birth.

I think that midwifery and home birth are powerful and significant acts of resistance. They represent:

resistance to modern technological birth and the medicalization of birth and women’s bodies. resistance to the medical management of labor, if fact, to the very concept of labor management. resistance to the view of the human body as a machine and application of machines to the human body. The human body is not a machine nor is the earth and the universe. Pregnancy, labor and birth are no more mechanical processes than is a bud opening in Spring. As a friend recently said, “the body is a story waiting to be told.” This is a story that is a part of and not apart from the unfolding of the natural world and the universe and the lives of individuals, families and communities. resistance to violence against women, newborns, children and families. resistance to technologies that disempower women by separating women from themselves, their bodies and their inner wisdom resistance to the imposition of the clock (time management) on a process whose rhythm and power and fragility is akin to the blossoming of a flower or the unfolding of leaves in Spring. resistance to the belief that humans, with their technology, can control life, guarantee perfect outcomes (“outcomes” are the medical jargon for healthy mothers and babies), and eliminate the possibility of disability or death.

The idea/belief that technology is the answer and control the means begins in the birth experiences of most women in this culture. Technologies are not neutral to be evaluated by purpose, outcome, effectiveness or safety. They change our understanding of who we are, what we are able to do, what our capacities are —spiritual, physical and adaptive, and what life means.

Midwifery and home birth are not only or primarily about resistance; they are about another story — a story that is rich, varied, textured, life-giving, communal, and educational. Nothing is more embodied than birth; it is not about abstract ideology, but about practice, about life. Midwifery and home birth embody powerful affirmations relating to:

the sacredness of birth the spiritual, emotional, psychological, familial and communal dimensions of birth. the integrity of women’s bodies and the birth process. the rightness of the birth process the wisdom needed to discern the appropriate use of technology and interventions for supporting life and facilitating and correcting natural processes when needed. Reality. Midwifery and home birth affirm reality, not as defined by those in power, but by those who experience it.

Speaking of reality, as a midwife I affirm that prenatal care is first and foremost the care women give themselves and that the health of mothers and babies is fostered by adequate nutrition, decent housing, education, and social support. In most situations medical care/clinical care is never more than a mirror held up to the effects of these factors. Medical is not and never will be the solution to the social problems that find the United States 17th in the world in infant mortality and plagued with one of the highest low birth weight rates amongst the developed countries.

Birth is the most intimate and personal and yet most social of acts and, I think, cosmic in its implications. I view myself as a connection maker. How can I be connected to birth and not be connected with every birth and the birth and continuing rebirth of creation? Birth is about family making and I will not let others appropriate “family values.” The question is always, “who is our family? Who is inside and who/what are outside the circle of our caring?” The forces that Kirkpatrick Sales referred to threaten more than our individual selves and preciously chosen alternative ways of living. While in this culture the attack upon and undermining of breastfeeding can profoundly alter the emotional and physical experience of feeding for mothers and infants and can weaken the immune system and increase consumption of products, in developing countries such undermining kills infants, disempowers women, impoverishes families and destroys cultural ways of nurturing and raising children. Birth technologies exported to developing countries undermine and devalue women’s wisdom and experience, as they do here, but also destroy cultural ways and a sense of competence essential to survival.

As a midwife I tell stories. Eli Weisel said that God created human beings because He loved stories. Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge. Stories are a way of keeping hope alive and preserving ways of living. Truth is conveyed in the narrative more powerfully than in argument. Women and families find meaning and strength and inspiration in the stories of other women’s births. They find power in telling their own stories. I teach, with stories, the women whose births I attend and the women who apprentice with me as midwives. We cannot underestimate the power of stories to effect change. We change the philosophy and practice of the culture by living and reflecting upon and telling the stories of our lived experience.

This Congress is about moving beyond our individual lives to our role in transforming the consciousness of society. Home birth and community midwifery are about a different story. They are reminders and a challenge to the wider society of possibility and of what is being forgotten and destroyed, and what needs to be remembered. I think that power lies in living and telling that rich story and reflecting on its meaning. I could tell hundreds of stories. I’ve been privileged to witness and be part of so many. But I am going to share the one I know best — my own. It honors the power of connection — the thread that weaves our lives together. I am here as a midwife because of the birth of my daughter, Damara. In her birth I also gave birth to myself. But I am also here, in this spot, because of her. She met Scott back in October at Guilford College and I met Art and Peggy Gish while visiting her there.