Fear of Birth
Flash back to the age of twelve. Sitting in science class, this is the first time I remember covering male and female human anatomy in school. It was no joke, as I remember sitting in class watching a video our sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Bell, had turned on for us. Before we knew it, someone in class yelled “check out that bush!”, and we were full on watching a woman in labor on the cusp of delivering her baby. On her back, no less, feet in stirrups. What an intro into sex education!
But memories of birth and pregnancy go back far beyond that. As a kid growing up in the 90s with cable television, my parents (who did a wonderful job) were potentially a little less discerning than today’s generation of parents when it came to what screen time looked like for me regarding content. Thanks to channels such as ABC Family and Lifetime, I saw countless clips and scenes from movies and TV shows of women in labor, typically screaming at the top of their lungs, gripping the hands of partners, shouting at doctors and nurses for epidurals, and pushing like there’s no tomorrow. Not to mention, scenes of this nature were always with women on their backs, feet in stirrups, in hospitals. I do not recall ever seeing a labor scene in a home birth/birth center setting with anything even close to a midwife or doula.
Traditionally, humans used to grow up in tribes. This was a positive for many reasons. Wisdom and information was passed down not only from generation to generation within a single family, but wisdom was passed down and spread amongst entire tribes of people, men and women alike. Aunties and Uncles shared what the great Aunties and Uncles had passed down to them. It created a different kind of wealth and abundance. One of immense support and opportunity. Women in the throws of pregnancy and birth were not just taken care of and supported by their own blood, but by the blood of those who had already been through what they were going through now. Aunties, mothers, sisters by blood and by spirit alike all gathered to support, to learn, to grow, to serve one another. Children were not just raised by a mother and a father, but by an entire collective of people. This increases a child’s odds of an expanded perception, of learning how to solve problems and resolve conflict, and opens up bonding experiences that we are often lacking in today’s modern and protected world.
In the modern world this does not exist to the same extent. The degree of sharing is different. We feel a stronger need to protect our own and ensure that we are teaching them the right way to do things and see things and move through the world. Women are feeling vastly more unprepared for pregnancy and birth, because it is, quite simply, not something anyone has ever taken the time to teach us and prepare us for. So many women only know what we see on television.
And this takes me back to the beginning. As a someone who has lived with a fear of needles and medical doctors for as long as I can remember, the idea of pregnancy, let alone birth, scared me. Terrified me. I joked around with my younger sister that her and I would both have surrogates to evade the entire process. No ultrasounds, no scans, no bloodwork, no birth process, no pain.
The pain seemed like the scariest part. Based on what I now know to be hyperbolic birth scenes from television, it seemed as though the process of bringing a baby into this world was just so incredibly painful.
That women couldn’t wait to get jabbed with an epidural, numbing them out of the experience, and breaking the connection between mind and body in one of the most pivotal events in a woman’s life. That yelling and screaming were inevitable. That it had to be done a certain way, in a certain place, based on the schedule of the obstetrician, not of mama, let alone nature.
That it was to be done like a sporting event. With bright lights, loud cheering, coaching all the way through as if it were like coming up on a critical play late in the game.
Baby is used to a warm, protected, compressed, dark, quiet place, and we want to birth a baby into the opposite of all of those things?
It just didn’t make sense to me. It didn’t feel congruent and I couldn’t place my finger on why.
I honestly didn’t know there was another way.
And then I found chiropractic.
I found out that birth didn’t have to involve needles.
I found out that birth didn’t have to be done in a hospital, a place where sick people go, but could be done at home or in a birthing center (country dependent).
I found out that birth didn’t have to be done in a supine position.
I found out that birth could be connected, empowering, sacred and beautiful.
I found out that while fear is normal during pregnancy and birth, it does not have to be the focus of the experience.
I found out that there is an innate intelligence within each and every one of us, that allows the body to heal, to thrive, to know exactly what it needs at all times.
I found out that there is a universal intelligence in all matter, continually giving to it all its properties and actions, thus maintaining it in existence.
What’s written just above here is what we call in chiropractic, The Major Premise. This is one of the founding principles of this beautiful profession with which I am so enamored.
Allow me to break this down.
Universal Laws are responsible for the existence of everything, such as laws in chemistry and physics. But what is directing these laws in the first place? What is keeping these electrons in an atom in motion around a nucleus? Universal intelligence is simply the organizing intelligence of these tiny pieces of matter. This is constant in all things.
We as humans are no different. As humans, our building blocks are also atoms, which then group into molecules, which group into cells, and tissues, and organs, and so on. We, too, are organized by this universal intelligence.
For me, this took a lot of the stress off of this whole birth thing.
I realized that I didn’t have to actually do anything.
I did not have to tell my body how to grow a spinal cord for my baby, or alert it to the fact that now at eight weeks it is time to start growing eyelids and ears, or at thirty weeks it is time to start growing red blood cells.
It is not my job to do any of that. My job is simply to take care of myself, to find trust in my body, to commune with the innate intelligence that resides within me that is also helping my future baby to develop perfectly in every way, and to simply get out of the way, and allow to do so.
In tribes and collectives, I feel that this message was conveyed. This sense of having trust in your body, trust in the process, trust in the elders who had done it before. There was no competition that existed to tell the most dreaded and scariest pregnancy and birth stories as exists today.
The more I learned about the innate power my body had to heal, to grow, to thrive with a clear nervous system, the more the fear melted away.
I could feel myself shifting, wanting to know more and more about the process of pregnancy—seeing it for the absolute miracle and gift that it is.
While I am a ways off from having a baby of my own, I feel that this is why I have been so drawn to serve mamas in their pregnancy and birth journeys—and hopefully far beyond as well.
I didn’t want other women, or even young girls, to feel how I felt growing up—simply not knowing. We don’t know what we don’t know, right?
My mission is to help guide women back home to this inherent trust in their bodies, helping them to feel empowered in their process of growing a literal human inside of them. To let them know that it is okay to be scared, but they are divinely supported in this process and that they are not in it alone.
I am fortunate enough to get to do this every day through chiropractic, through this clearing of the nervous system, so universal and innate intelligence can work together to do what it does so beautifully. And us humans, and our educated minds that so badly want to do and control, can sit back and get out of the way, and allow one of the most beautiful processes to unfold exactly as it is meant to be.
