“For Clare Morrissey, her planned freebirth, at home without any medical assistance, was “absolutely beautiful”. After two hospital births, both with epidurals, and her third at a birthing centre, Mrs Morrissey decided to have a homebirth free of any help from a doctor or midwife.

It’s a huge responsibility to have a freebirth, and with that comes a lot of research, information and knowing what you are going into,” Mrs Morrissey said. “Had we not felt confident we had that knowledge and ability we wouldn’t have done it. One of the biggest responsibilities is knowing that if anything goes wrong, to go to the hospital.”

Click here to read the full story at www.theage.com.au

This is one of the more important points I want to make to anyone considering an unassisted childbirth or freebirth. When choosing this method you are exchanging intrusive, painful and harmful hospital and midwife interventions for total responsibility. When you choose to birth alone you are choosing to take responsibility for unforeseen circumstances.

That means among other things that you need to know abnormal signs to look for, when you better get to the hospital in a hurry and how to perform infant CPR. One of the things that makes unassisted childbirth such a realistic option in western countries is our unlimited access to prenatal information, our knowledge of basic hygiene and our proximity to emergency healthcare. While UC is a very safe, calm and non-violent option for childbirth it still requires a certain amount of education and preparation.

Click here to read the full article

Sheryl’s comments:
And people think unassisted birth is uncivilized??? This is a classic example of why using a midwife is no guarantee of a natural birth. Even the best intentioned midwives frequently interfere with the natural progression of birth.

Midwives have financial incentive to avoid sending the birthing mother to the services of an obstetrician and they often have to adhere to an arbitrary legal birthing time line so to avoid a hospital transfer for “time reasons” midwives often do all sorts of things to women to “speed things up”. Midwives are also trying to avoid lawsuits and many are admittedly in as much of a rush to go home to their family as any obstetrician.

Some midwives, particularly “medwives” (CNMs who practice in a hospital setting and fancy themselves obstetricians) also engage in the barbaric and insane practice of immediate cord clamping. In a natural birth when the cord is done pulsing and the baby has received their life giving oxygenated blood and the baby has successful transfered to pulmonary oxygenation (lung breathing) and the baby begins breastfeeding and oxytocin floods the mother’s brain (not from a poisonous shot of Pitocin) then the placenta will naturally detach. There is simply no need to yank on the cord!

DO NOT LET YOUR OB-GYN OR MIDWIFE CUT OR CLAMP THE CORD IMMEDIATELY!

Up to 1/3 of your baby’s blood (that belongs inside your baby’s body) is still contained in the placenta. This is the leading cause of infant anemia. This final blood transfusion is a backup plan for delayed breathing or complications and provides critical oxygen before the oxygen from breathed air hits the baby’s brain.

It absolutely infuriates me that these birth attendants are in such a damn rush that they can’t let the baby have its own blood and oxygen. If I am fortunate enough to have another child and unfortunate enough to have another person in attendance, I will knock them out cold before I let them touch the cord.

If you are going to let someone else attend your birth then please:

1. Make him or her sign the birth plan stating that you insist that they do not touch the umbilical cord until it is done pulsing
2. Do not let him/her convince you that they will “give you two minutes”. It takes 10-20 to stop pulsing.
3. Threaten legal action if he/she clamps the cord, even for a cesarean
4. Get a new OB-GYN or midwife if they refuse to let your child keep the oxygen/blood that is rightfully theirs. How on earth can ten minutes of that person’s time be worth blood and oxygen from your baby’s body? Ten lousy minutes when they are making thousands of dollars off of you. Are you willing to risk a lifelong birth injury from oxygen deprivation to your baby’s brain? Your midwife or OB-GYN is certainly willing to risk it unless you stop them.

Or you can make the civilized choice and try unassisted childbirth or homebirth with a midwife who values cord blood, to ensure that no one inflicts this harmful procedure on your innocent and helpless child.

The midwife in attendance does not touch the baby, violate the mother or hinder the birth in any way. If something (God forbid) precludes me from having an unassisted birth the next time around then I swear that I am going to fly to the Netherlands to give birth because those midwives seem to understand the birthing process better than any other midwife I have seen.

Notice how easily the baby comes out. Notice how the mother’s vagina opens naturally with gravity helping out (and not a mutilating episiotomy). Notice how the baby turns naturally, all on its own. Notice how there is no blood. Notice how the midwife does not need to yank the baby out by its head. Notice how there is no epidural but the mother almost sounds like she is having an orgasm.

How can anyone even consider having a hospital birth after watching how perfect, natural and wonderful this birth is?

This point is made in a very dramatic way if you watch hospital birth videos side by side with home birth videos. Thank you Laura!

Adults have their own rhyme and reason for birth choices. Doctors and midwives make choices for convenience, scheduling, to avoid lawsuits or for profit. You may make decisions based on personal beliefs, research, the influence of others, your own benefit, and quite likely for what you believe to be the good of the baby.

Doctors and midwives may claim to “first do no harm”, but that apparently does not hold true in childbirth which is evidenced by the United State’s embarrassingly high infant mortality rate and intervention rate. It is your job as the parent then, to distinguish fact from fiction to uncover what is really in the best interest of your child. What is really best for your baby? What is your baby thinking or feeling during childbirth? What does your baby really want?

BABIES WANT TO AVOID PAIN
It is fairly logical to assume that your baby does not want to experience pain. Many birth interventions such as breaking the water, labor inductions, forceps or surgery can cause the baby pain by forcing the babies skull against the mothers pelvis, crushing the baby with intolerable and relentless contractions, nicking the baby with a scalpel, or the unimaginable pain of forceps dragging them out of the birth canal by their head.

Labor inductions can cause crushing contractions which smash the babies head into the mother’s pelvis repeatedly. For some barbaric reason anesthesia is rarely used in circumcision which is clearly excruciating for the baby not to mention totally unnecessary. Vaccinations are also painful. Some of these procedures are so painful and traumatic that the baby fails to make eye contact with its parents or breastfeed at all.

BABIES WANT OXYGEN
Babies also seem to enjoy adequate blood and oxygen. Anything that compresses the umbilical cord which is quite literally, the babies lifeline, will understandably cause fetal distress and if not resolved can cause potentially irreversible brain damage. This is the worst nightmare of any parent but I am quite sure the baby didn’t sign up for it either. A combination of broken waters and a supine (on the back position) can cause the baby to lie on its own cord and compress it.

The supine position also compresses the mother’s vena cava which is the main vein supplying blood to the uterus. Pregnant women dutifully sleep on their side through pregnancy only to get to the hospital and start suffocating their baby to give the doctor a better view.

Many interventions used in hospitals restrict blood flow to the uterus either through contractions or from the fight or flight response of the mother. The violent contractions brought on by Pitocin and Cytotec restrict or eliminate the blood supply to the uterus causing dramatic fetal distress often “necessitating” a cesarean section. Overly long or strong contractions essentially suffocate the fetus by only allowing the fetus to “breathe” briefly between contractions.

By far the single most common intervention that literally robs a newborn of up to one third of their blood supply is the insane practice of immediate cord clamping. There is not one scientifically valid reason to clamp a cord immediately. The cord pulses for approximately 15-20 minutes following birth and this pulsing is the babies final and vital blood transfusion. The cord blood is rich with stem cells, iron, and oxygen and it is 100% the property of the baby.

The cord continues to pulse during the baby’s crucial transition to pulmonary oxygenation (breathing through the lungs). It can take several minutes for the oxygen from breathing air to reach the baby’s brain and the oxygenated cord blood compensates in this critical time. As you can imagine, cutting the babies lifeline literally starves the babies brain of oxygen until the lungs can take over. In addition to potential irreversible brain damage, immediate cord clamping also robs the baby of vital iron and causes widespread childhood anemia. The easiest way to avoid anemia? Let the baby retain the blood that is rightfully theirs.

BABIES WANT SECURITY
Babies want to stay in the comfort and safety of the womb until it is time to come out. Inductions and C-sections that are scheduled for convenience or some other arbitrary reason are quite simply removing the baby prematurely. Birth will happen when the baby is done growing. Babies stay inside the womb for a reason and they want to remain there until they are done growing. Some studies indicate that doctors are the leading cause of premature births in the United States.

The unfortunate truth is that virtually all medical interventions carry risks to the mother and baby. In fact, many of the interventions are so harmful to the baby that they lead to fetal distress which puts parents under pressure to submit to even more procedures that carry even greater potential for harm. Almost no parent will say no to something that will save their child when the baby’s heart rate is dropping precipitously. The fact remains that the doctor or midwife caused the distress in the first place.

BABIES WANT A LOVING WELCOME
Try to imagine that you are coming into the world for the first time as a baby(or an alien if that is easier for you). You feel yourself being blasted from the sanctity of the womb to the shrieks of agony of your mother and the militant shouts of others as you are suffocated on and off for twelve hours while your head is rammed repeatedly into bone. Then you feel your body become heavy and unresponsive as you are drugged into oblivion. You are suddenly exposed to blinding light and a crowd of eyes peeking between mask and cap as your mother is filleted to rip you from the safety of your mother’s body. 1/3 of your blood supply is drained from your body as your primary life giving organ is cut from your body without painkillers. Your lungs are not fully developed since you are a few weeks early and since you didn’t travel down the birth canal the amniotic fluid was never squeezed from your lungs. You are whisked away in the latex gloves of uncaring, unresponsive hurried strangers who ram a syringe up your nose, weigh you on a cold metal table, inject you with toxic chemicals, blind you, and irreversibly mutilate your penis without any painkillers. You are finally handed to your mother who is too tortured, butchered and drugged to hold you much less breastfeed.

Conversely imagine coming into the world for the first time in a homebirth setting. You stay in the uterus until your mothers highly evolved and naturally intelligent birthing mechanism understands that you are ready to be born. You feel the strong and gentle hugging squeeze of the uterine contractions as they gently but firmly propel you into the birth canal. You can hear the familiar sounds of your parents and maybe some music. They are talking to you, encouraging you, telling you they love you and cant wait to meet you. You feel the familiar rhythm of your mother’s body moving into various positions that give you ample room to comfortably rotate into the perfect position to be born in. You are squeezed out with a final hugging push or two into the loving warm waiting arms of your parents (perhaps to the sound of your mother’s orgasm) and you are placed on mom’s warm waiting chest within seconds. You blink a bit in the semi darkness and hear your mothers voice without the buffer of the womb for the first time. You hear her love and see into her eyes as you instinctively latch on. Meanwhile your body is being infused with the final blood transfusion that will give you all the oxygen, blood, stem cells and immunity you need for the healthiest start in life. While you latch on to your mother’s warm, waiting breast, her body releases oxytocin which improves your bonding, releases her breast milk, and causes the cord to stop the transfusion, the placenta to detach from the uterine wall and deliver itself naturally. The colustrum from your mother’s breast is all the Vitamin K you need especially since no one will be mutilating your penis. There is no Hepatitis vaccine since you aren’t sexually active quite yet and your penis stays happily and gratefully intact.

There are many arguments for and against natural birth but from the baby’s point of view there is undeniably no contest.

Image Source: http://flickr.com/photos/silversldr/2451035644/

Why an Unassisted Childbirth (UC) or Homebirth is the Superior Choice over Hospital Birth for the Vast Majority of Women.

A woman in the United States today has three options for giving birth.

• Hospital Delivery
• Midwife Home or Birthing Center Delivery
• Unassisted Childbirth

Although all choices can be appropriate depending on the circumstances, the vast majority of babies can be brought into this world at home without the assistance of a midwife or doctor. We will show it is without question the safest and sanest option.

Hospital Delivery
The first location most people think of for giving birth is of course, the hospital. The hospital is probably the best place to be if you are having a heart attack or if you were in a car accident but the worst place you can be if you are trying to give birth after having a healthy, uneventful pregnancy with no complications.

If you have been told your entire life that the only place to have a baby is the hospital, you probably have a hard time digesting what we are telling you. You may automatically object with scenarios you have been brainwashed with. We were all brainwashed. Don’t feel bad. You have the opportunity through reading this to educate yourself and seek the best possible care for yourself and your child.

What exactly is wrong with a hospital birth? Primarily, interventions. Interventions that are, in the vast majority of cases, totally unnecessary and totally harmful. For some reason hospitals and their personnel only consider something unsafe if it causes death or permanent quantifiable disability or damage (ie: if they can be sued).

Depriving a fetus of oxygen for example can obviously cause damage but since the damage cannot be measured or proven unless they kill the baby or cause a cerebral palsy, unconscionable obstetricians and midwives continue to regularly use interventions that always compromise the babies oxygen.

Picture a neonatal nurse covering your newborn’s face with a pillow two minutes on, two minutes off for twelve hours or twenty four hours or more. Ridiculous right? She would go to jail, lose her job and license. But when medical “professionals” do the same thing to a baby in utero nobody questions them. Pregnant women trust that the doctor or midwife is doing what is absolutely necessary. When in a horrifying percentage of the time they are suffocating the baby for their own convenience.

Interventions include labor induction, fetal and maternal monitoring, epidurals, forced pushing, and C-sections. These are just some of the interventions and all are harmful to the mother, the fetus, or both.

Unfortunately you cannot escape the interventions by using a midwife in a hospital setting. Once you are “on their turf”, just like obstetricians, they feel they can do anything they want to you despite verbal or written directions to the contrary. In a hospital they will induce, perform episiotomies, and pretty much do everything an obstetrician does except a C-Section. They are sell outs, not to be trusted. A midwife in a hospital is nothing more than a wolf in sheep’s clothing. A wolf who didn’t go to medical school mind you.

Keep in mind that the majority of doctors and midwives have been brainwashed as well and they actually believe the bunk they are telling people. This does not excuse their behavior. They are torturing, mutilating, butchering, and suffocating innocent women and children. This is beyond inexcusable. It is outrageous. We would like to think that they pay attention to facts and current studies since it is their livelihood but apparently once they have a belief in place they will cling to it no matter what the evidence.

The most important lesson, therefore, is to educate yourself. Don’t believe anything they tell you. They often don’t know what they are talking about or don’t care that what they are telling you is false.

If you have a normal low-risk pregnancy then please seriously consider avoiding the hospital at all costs. Make the hospital a place to go when something goes wrong, not the place to go to ensure that something will go wrong.

Every time you get in your car you risk getting in an accident. But the overwhelming odds are that you will be safe and accident free. You still drive, you don’t live in fear, you don’t require police escorts everywhere you go, you drive yourself with confidence and you take common sense precautions like using seat belts and not using cell phones. Think of this analogy anytime someone says “what if something goes wrong?” when you talk about home birth.

Midwife Assisted Childbirth
The second place a woman can choose to give birth is a birthing center or at home with a midwife. This option is far and away a better choice than the hospital. Many studies have shown this option to be as safe if not safer than a hospital delivery.

The problem again lies in the interventions when nature should be left well enough alone. Some wonderful midwives have trust in a woman’s body and patience to wait out a natural childbirth. If you know of one of those spectacular women, congratulations. They are a rare and wonderful breed. We mean midwives that are willing to wait days for labor to start without any pelvic exams or “natural” inductions. Those midwives are extremely rare, valuable and very hard to find.

Many midwives will intervene for a variety of reasons ranging from guidelines they must adhere to before sending a client to the hospital to impatience at the birth process. Some midwives even admit they will perform unnecessary and dangerous procedures such as using Pitocin or immediate cord clamping because they want to go home as soon as possible.

Whatever the reason, these interventions are not in your best interest. They are not in the best interest of your child. Do you care even a little bit about your doctor or midwives schedule? Is their convenience worth compromising the safety of yourself or your child? It is ludicrous to even make that comparison. Of course you can (and should) fight back and argue and kick and scream and yell and rip out IVs and check yourself out of the hospital or fire your midwife at the 11th hour but wouldn’t it be easier to choose the third option?

Unassisted Childbirth
The third option, unassisted childbirth is not new to the world, but the idea is likely new to you. Proponents of unassisted childbirth or UC feel that a woman’s body is perfectly capable of delivering the baby and does best with no interference at all from outside “help”. Childbirth should be a private, magical moment (just like making love to create the life in the first place).

What a delightful and liberating option! It makes so much sense. This may be heartbreaking for those who have already lived through a horrific hospital birth or even a moderately invasive midwife birth. You may feel twice as violated knowing what your gut already told you. Nobody should be staring at your vagina and violating it repeatedly. Unnecessary. Is it really that far off from rape when you know that you didn’t need to lay on your back with your legs spread? The reality is too horrible for many people to face.

If you are pregnant you can still save your privacy, your dignity, and your safety. If you know someone who is pregnant by all means educate them. At the very least tell them this is a possibility. This is without a doubt, hands down the best option.

Read the research, study the evidence. Prepare yourself for contingencies. Educate yourself. Go to Laura Shanley’s fantastic website www.unassistedchildbirth.com for UC stories and empowering information. Better yet buy her book. Get all the books on natural childbirth you can get your hands on. Read Ina May Gaskin and Henci Goer. Watch The Business of Being Born and read the book Pushed. Get them from the library, beg, borrow, or steal them, but just read them.

Plenty of women wish that they would have had this information even as late as the morning of their delivery and they would have NEVER gone to the hospital. It is not too late even if you are already in the hospital. Women have checked themselves out when faced with dangerous interventions and you can too.

Image Source: http://flickr.com/photos/bbaltimore/43118436/

This is a short, silent clip of another hospital birth video. Hospital childbirths are always disturbing and here is another great example. First of all, notice the birthing position. The poor mother is nothing more than a vagina to the staff. The modern medical model of childbirth is the ultimate objectification of women. Make no mistake about it. You see the poor mother’s head peek over her stomach once to see what is going on. Also notice the blood. You rarely see that in a homebirth.

The second thing you should notice about this childbirth video is the way the birth attendant holds the poor baby upside down by its feet while she deprives it of much needed blood and oxygen by clamping the cord prematurely. Are these people monsters? Are they just brainless? I just don’t get it!! Does anyone think about the poor baby? Who holds a baby by its feet? WHO?? What a welcome to the world.

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Secrets of having a great birth are uncovered in this newly released book. 48 moms share their stories and wisdom through their own inspirational birth stories.

(PRWEB) — Studies show that nine out of ten first-time mothers are afraid of giving birth and worried about the pain. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Childbirth educator Sheri Menelli has discovered that hearing childbirth “horror stories” can have a profoundly negative effect on pregnant women’s birth experiences. When fear and anxiety about childbirth are passed from woman to woman, these intense emotions create additional stress for the mother and baby. Doctors call this the “Fear/Tension/Pain” cycle.

Menelli set out to collect inspiring stories of successful labor and delivery experiences to help calm women’s fears. “With so much negative media about birth, it is time to bring back positive stories,” Menelli said. “The culture of fear surrounding childbirth in the U.S. is shifting, and women are eager to share their wonderful birth experiences.”

Menelli’s just-published book, Journey into Motherhood: Inspirational Stories of Natural Birth (White Heart Publishing, November 2004), offers a collection of 48 true stories of natural birth, told in the mothers’ own voices. As diverse as the women who wrote them, the stories include hospital births, home births, unassisted births, emergency deliveries, births attended by young siblings, outdoor births and more.

These stories describe the strategies and tools that can make birth a much better experience. Journey into Motherhood is filled with proven techniques to help women have a powerful and positive childbirth, including:

• How women can experience painless labor
• Insights and advice from mothers who’ve been there
• Options for easing labor and delivery—including yoga, doulas, hypnosis and water birth
• A resource guide to childbirth classes, magazines, websites and audios/videos

“What a fabulous book. All women and girls need to hear these stories and know, really know, that natural birth is full of magnificent, life-changing wisdom,” said Christiane Northrup,
M.D., author of “Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom” and “The Wisdom of Menopause.”

Sheri Menelli has dedicated her career to the education and empowerment of pregnant women. As a certified HypnoBirthing educator, she taught hundreds of couples how to have an easier, more comfortable birth. Sheri previously produced and co-hosted a San Diego radio show, “The Real Side of Birth.” She also authored and produced two guided meditation CDs: Light Meditation and Breastfeeding Meditation. A San Diego County resident, Sheri has one daughter and is expecting twins.

Naturally, the biggest battle cry against UC is the “what if something goes wrong” argument. What UC advocates realize is that vast majority of “things going wrong” are caused by the rush, greed and convenience of the system and the interventions involved in medicalized childbirth. The majority of potential complications can be diagnosed prior to delivery or are slow to develop during delivery. Complications that are unforeseen, life threatening, develop immediately and not caused by medical personnel are thankfully extremely rare and usually have the same devastating outcome in a hospital setting. Read the freebirthing article and the great commentary at www.independent.co.uk

Macari makes an excellent argument for all women to explore within to find their Divine Feminine and take that to their pregnancy and birthing experience in order to have ‘Spirit’ present at the birth rather than “reducing it to a bodily function”, which unfortunately is exactly what happens in the majority of births today.

Reducing childbirth to a mere bodily function requires the same level of disconnect that casual sex requires, according to Macari. If women were to understand their value and worth, have self esteem and confidence, then they could stand up for themselves in childbirth and take back the right to choose and “demand respect, choices and freedom”.

Macari also explores pain in childbirth and never denies that childbirth has extreme sensations that some may call painful, but she continues to reiterate the idea that we do not have words in our language to describe these sensations. They are overwhelming and yes, sometimes painful, but they can also be pleasurable if women do not have preconceived notions about pain.

Macari describes childbirth as a rite of passage into womanhood, motherhood and more. Part of what makes childbirth a rite is courage in the face of pain and even compares it to walking hot coals that requires courage and the support of others to get through the rite and the very act of facing your fears and making it through to the other side is the magical, spiritual and transformational part of childbirth that is so often taken from us when our babies are violently taken from our drugged bodies in a hospital setting.

Macari also goes on to credit pain with being the very thing that makes birth possible. Without the contractions, the baby will never leave it’s mother’s body. She is adamantly opposed to the use of pain relief in childbirth, not because women should feel pain, but because of what it takes away from childbirth such as a woman’s instincts and inner strength to know what is right for the birthing process as well as the endorphins that create the natural “high” that is only present in natural births.

One of the most useful parts about “She Births” are the meditation and journaling sections at the end of each chapter. These are wonderful both for expecting women to really explore their feelings and perceptions about childbirth, but it also allows women who were robbed of their rite to find some comfort and perhaps some peace from what went wrong.

There is also a decent sized section in the book that contains natural childbirth stories which are always great to read and none are the gruesome medical childbirth stories that we dread. Some might even bring a tear to your eye. “She Births” is empowering and enlightening and will encourage any women who instinctively knows that childbirth is much more than a medical event to stand up and take back childbirth.

“She Births” is not a “how to” manual for natural childbirth but it does answer the question “why have a natural childbirth” from a fresh perspective. Childbirth is so much more than the physical act, and women have the unique and unparalleled opportunity to be the vessel that the spirit travels through to bring a new life into the world.

I would recommend this book for any woman who felt something intangible was missing from a previous childbirth or who knows that their rite of passage was taken from them during a previous childbirth. This is an excellent resource to work through childbirth trauma and find forgiveness. Even more importantly, this book should be required reading for any woman who is pregnant or planning to become pregnant and understands that there is an intangible spiritual side to life, birth and death that we can either deny or embrace fully to provide ourselves and our babies with the best, most joyous, fulfilling Birth possible.

If you would like to learn more about Marcie Macari and Shebirths, visit shebirths.com
Buy the book: She Births: A Modern Woman’s Guidebook for an Ancient Rite of Passage