Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (101 page)

A number of different techniques can be used to stimulate these points, including acupuncture needles or a heat treatment known as moxibustion. If you don’t have access to an acupuncturist who is familiar with these techniques, you can try acupressure if your physician approves. Press the point on either toe with your fingernail. Use enough pressure so that the area feels sensitive, but not enough to cause pain. Hold the pressure for one to two minutes once or twice a day. Immediately afterward, get into the knee-chest position for about fifteen minutes. (This position will also help turn the baby.) You can use this technique starting in the seventh month of pregnancy. (Earlier in the pregnancy, the fetus is likely to turn on its own.) Do not attempt this if you have any uterine or pelvic abnormality, a history of habitual miscarriage, or if there have been other problems in the pregnancy. Be sure to consult your doctor before beginning.

At some very deep level, we are all awed by pregnant women and their power. But instead of emphasizing a woman’s awe-inspiring birth power, in classic patriarchal reversal our culture attends to the fear that that power brings up. Pregnant women are emotionally more porous and more in touch with their intuition than usual, and they are therefore more vulnerable. They pick up on all the collective societal fear of them.

Media images of pregnant women suddenly falling to the ground during pregnancy and shrieking things like, “Oh, John, the baby!” reinforce in our psyches the notion that pregnancy is a time of great danger and unpredictability instead of a normal process. They promote the misconception that pregnancy, like our female body, is a disaster waiting to happen. In every hospital I’ve ever worked in, pregnant women who come into the emergency room are rushed to the labor and delivery floor as quickly as possible, even if they’ve come in for some other problem. In Boston, the ER crew once sent up a woman in mid-pregnancy who had a broken leg!

This emergency mind-set is especially damaging to women who are having babies in their thirties or forties. Most, if not all, pregnant women over the age of thirty are taught by our culture that they are much more at risk for complications than if they were in their twenties. This perception of increased risk is not necessarily true and depends on the individual woman’s health. I remember the first pregnant woman I ever met who was over thirty. It was in the prenatal clinic at the Mary Hitchcock Hospital during my second year of medical school, and I thought that she was very unusual and very brave to be having her first baby at such an advanced age—thirty-two. Looking back, I realize that this woman was at the very beginning of a trend that began in the 1970s and has continued unabated through the present; delaying childbearing until later. (As an evolutionary side note, my now twentysomething daughters both feel that marrying much before the age of thirty is awfully young.)

Women having their first babies after the age of thirty-five were once referred to as
elderly primigravidas
. Happily, that term has been dropped. Though the term
geriatric obstetrics
is still used occa sionally, it should be eliminated, as it sets up all kinds of negativity. Whether or not a woman is more at risk in her thirties must be com pletely individualized. A forty-year-old in excellent health who has a planned pregnancy is apt to do much better than a twenty-five-year-old who smokes two packs and quaffs a gallon of Diet Coke per day. Too often the medical profession “hexes” women who become pregnant in their thirties and forties by lumping them into statistically high-risk categories that are not necessarily applicable. Older women who are pregnant, as well as infertility patients who become pregnant, have a much higher risk of a C-section. In some places, a woman older than forty will be told that she is very apt to have a cesarean because hers is a “premium pregnancy” (as opposed to a pregnancy in the mother’s twenties, whose success doesn’t “matter” as much because “you can always have another—you have time”). Because the mother is presumed to be more anxious (or is
made
to be anxious by her culture and her doctor), we should treat her differently. This is a reflection of the health care team’s own unfinished emotional work. And this is the thinking that has led to our current all-time high rate of cesarean birth—which is now about 33 percent,
³⁵
despite the fact that the World Health Organization says that a 5 to 10 percent rate is optimal and that recent research shows that anything over 15 percent does more harm than good.
³⁶
The rate of births by C-section keeps going up every year, and over the past decade it’s increased by more than 50 percent. Way back in 1965, for example, the rate was only 4.5 percent.
³⁷
At least in part, these sky-high rates may be linked to doctors’ fears of being sued. As of 2003, more than three-quarters of all American obstetricians had been sued at least once, with a median award of $2.3 million for medical negligence in childbirth. As a result, many doctors are more likely to opt for performing a C-section at the first sign of a complication.
³⁸
Even so, C-sections are far from benign proce dures, and our collective trust in them is mind-boggling.

In fact, age doesn’t predict anything when it comes to labor and birth. As noted in chapter 11 in relation to fertility, chronological age (age in years) and biological age (age of one’s tissues) aren’t necessarily related. One of my friends had her first baby at forty-one. The first stage of her labor lasted only three hours—very short by any standard. And if her hips hadn’t been so narrow, she’d have delivered in a total of four hours. Healthy women who are well supported in labor usually do beautifully, regardless of age.

One of the nicest things about women having their first babies in their late thirties and early forties is that by then, these women have established themselves in the outside world of work and career. When they do have babies, they take the time to enjoy them. They already know what it’s like “out there.” They realize the limitations of the corporate world and are willing to put aside its “benefits” to reassess their lives through the lens of parenting. Many have had time to get in touch with their bodies over the years and are more comfortable with themselves than they were in their twenties. In my mind, such women are actually low risk.

The Magic of Labor and Birth

Having a baby is the true “change of life.” Women who go through labor and birth fully supported often emerge from the experience changed forever. One of my patients who had her two children at home told me: “My births were absolute peak experiences of ecstasy and spiritual fulfillment. Nothing I’ve ever experienced before or since has come anywhere close. As a result of my experiences, I now trust my body implicitly.” In order to experience the transformational power of birth, women need to know the following:

1.
Labor proceeds on its own schedule. The delicate timing that is a result of the delicate interaction between a baby and her mother needs to be respected. (Risky labor inductions for “convenience” and all the complications associated with them, including increased risk of prematurity, C-section, and maternal death, are now on the rise all over the country. In 2006, more than 22 percent of all pregnant women in the United States had induced labors, a rate that has more than doubled in the last twenty years.)
³⁹

2.
Childbirth is designed by nature to be a peak experience that is joyous, ecstatic, and loving. The body of the laboring woman is designed to labor flawlessly when a woman is relaxed, well nourished, and well supported. If this weren’t the case, the human race never would have survived. During labor, the body is flooded with natural morphine-like substances called endorphins as well as oxy tocin, the bonding hormone. This kind of ecstasy is seen in centers such as the Farm Midwifery Center in Summertown, Tennessee, where the legendary midwife Ina May Gaskin practices. Her book
Ina May’s Guide to
Childbirth
(Bantam Books, 2003) is a must-read for all preg nant women. At a recent meeting of the Association for Pre-and Perinatal Psychology and Health, Ina May showed a picture of her niece giving birth naturally with a big smile on her face, something one never sees on television—or in most hospitals!

3.
Birth is sexual. This makes sense—after all, the baby is moving down the vaginal canal and stimulating the G-spot and all the nerves connected with sexual feeling. As Ina May says, “The energy that got the baby in is what gets the baby out. Many women experience the most intense orgasm of their lives when they birth in environments in which they are loved, adored, and fully supported.” This is probably the best-kept secret in the world.

One woman told me that after her baby was born she said to her doctor, “If I’d known it was going to feel this good, I’d have planned for ten babies!”

My ob-gyn colleague Bethany Hays, M.D., told me that when she was in labor herself with her first child and it was time to push, she recalls being in a place she could only identify as “somewhere I could not stay.” At this point she said she wanted to get rid of the baby at all costs. In subsequent births she again found herself in that “terrible, unac ceptable place” in which she used all her rational powers to “bypass that terrible transit through the pelvis”: “Just get tough.” “Get mad and get him out!” “Ignore the pain, just push through it.” This resulted, she notes, in “considerable pain and trauma to myself.”

Later in her career, Bethany met a woman who taught her—and me—the secret of the second stage of labor, which now seems obvious: Many women don’t want to push because we feel disconnected from that part of our bodies and because giving birth is a sexual experience, almost taboo with so many people looking on. Instead of pushing through the second stage of labor as though it were an athletic event, women would do well to let their uterus do the work, while allowing their vaginas to relax into the process.

During my residency training, I was accused of being Dr. Pain by the nurses because I didn’t insist on a spinal anesthetic for every delivery. Even then, I knew that pushing the baby out took a relatively small amount of time, and I believed that it was far better for a woman to be alert for her new baby than to have the lower half of her body paralyzed from a spinal so that forceps had to be used to pull the baby out. I witnessed many women who had spinal anesthesia for routine deliveries fall asleep on the delivery table. These women were much less “present” to greet their babies than those who had birthed normally.

Back then, I didn’t appreciate the fact that birth is part of the con tinuum of female sexuality and that by numbing the lower half of the body to feeling anything painful, we were also numbing the possibility for feeling anything ecstatic or sexual.

Though most people don’t know this, the art of belly dancing orig inated for the purpose of getting in touch with birthing power. Grandmothers taught it to granddaughters and daughters. I’m certain that the current resurgence of interest in the arts of belly dancing, pole dancing, and erotic dancing are being fueled by the resurgence of the energy of Aphrodite—the part of the feminine that the baby-boom feminists bypassed trying to be like men. With this luscious energy comes a reclaiming of our essential female birthing power. That’s why a young woman friend of mine who had an ecstatic hospital birth after dancing through most of the labor with her husband described the experience as “highly erotic.” One more thing: Ample evidence exists that the first drummers were women and that the beat of the drum re-created the beat of the heart, which set up an optimal rhythm for women to bring forth life. (This is laid out in the book
When the Drummers Were Women: A Spiritual History
of Rhythm
by Layne Redmond [Three Rivers Press, 1997].)

For more information, see the Orgasmic Birth website (
www.orgasmicbirth.org
). I also highly recommend the DVD
Birth as We Know It
by Russian-born filmmaker Elena Tonetti-Vladimirova, whose film of natural births, many along the shores of the Black Sea in Russia, is a must-see for all pregnant women. (For more information or to order the DVD, see Elena’s website,
www.birthintobeing.com
.)

4.
How you do it is what you get. Because of the height ened emotional and neurological receptivity of both mother and baby, the birth experience deeply imprints both mother and baby and impacts their relationship for a lifetime. If you approach labor as a disaster waiting to happen, or turn over your body to experts without consulting your inner wisdom, you will be missing out on a very empowering experience.

5.
Natural birth is safe. Studies have repeatedly shown that in healthy mothers with no risk factors, home birth is as safe as hospital birth. One study in the Netherlands looked at almost 530,000 low-risk planned births and found that with the proper services in place (such as a well-trained midwife and good transportation), home births are just as safe as hospital births.
⁴⁰
In fact, home birth may even be safer. Ina May Gaskin reports that at the Farm Midwifery Center, the C-section rate is only 1.4 percent—a safety rate unparalleled by hospitals. And her experience is clearly not solitary. A landmark study published in the
British Medical Journal
in 2005 found that natural birth at home, under the care of certified practicing midwives, is safe for low-risk mothers and their babies. This study, which tracked more than five thousand mothers in the United States and Canada, also reported that home births with low-risk mothers resulted in much lower rates of medical interventions when compared to the intervention rates for low-risk mothers giving birth in hospitals. For example, the episiotomy rate was 2.1 percent for the home-birth group, compared with 33 percent for hospital births, and labor was induced in only 9.6 percent of home births, compared with 21 percent of hospital births. The rates of electronic fetal monitoring, C-sections, forceps or vacuum delivery, and epidurals were also much lower with home births.
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