Making Birth Your Own

Talk Birth has a couple of good posts up on the uniqueness and individuality that can shine through in birth. A couple of memorable quotes:

I tell men in my classes not to be “scared” of their wives in labor, but to walk through the waves (of discomfort, anxiety, whatever) and just hold and love her. I tell them that they do not need to be “trained” to be more “special” or different than they are. They don’t need to be doulas. What they need to do is love her the way they love her and reach out to her to show her that [emphasis mine]."

And from Giving Birth: How It Really Feels by Sheila Kitzinger:

“I believe that this is one of the important things about preparation for childbirth–that it should not simple superimpose a series of techniques, conditioned responses to stimuli, on the labouring woman, but that it can be a truly creative act in which she spontaneously expresses herself and the sort of person she is. Education for birth consists not, as some would have it, of ‘conditioning,’ but aims at giving a woman the means by which she can express her own personality creatively in childbirth.”

This is one of my major beefs with hospital birth--in order to facilitate efficiency, a woman and her family's individuality and intimacy get stripped away and sacrificed in the name of various routines. I've seen many times that this can be a very disempowering way to start a family.