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(Above: My amazing five-year old daughter knows more about birth than most adults.  She is excited to witness her next home birth).

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How often, during a marathon, or a martial arts match, or a weight-lifting session, do we see bystanders breathlessly running onto the pitch, or into the ring, with syringes full of morphine, or handfuls of sedatives, reminding the participants of how unnecessarily painful their experience is, and of how easy it would be for them to just take the drugs and go lie down rather than to continue to their goal? The scenario is laughable.  It just doesn’t happen.  And it doesn’t happen, because men, and those engaged in stereotypically masculine endeavours, are recognized as freely exercising their prowess, or displaying their formidable resilience.

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During industrialized birth however, the standard approach to how birth is framed, is as an agonizing ordeal, which no one in their right mind can or should tolerate. Almost every woman who has given birth vaginally in the hospital will attest to the enormous pressure she is put under to accept the drugs, amid the prevalent institutional narrative that suggests that women who decline  medical pain relief are “in for it”, or will soon “cave”, or are otherwise “masochists”.

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Feeling sorry for women in the birth process is an impulse born of patriarchal superiority and a misunderstanding of what birth is, of how it works, and of the ecstasy that is chemically and hormonally programmed into the experience by biology.  Birth is an act of power, of creation.  Belittling birth, and birthing women, is chauvinism and condescension.  Giving birth, like running a marathon, is an experience of peak physical performance, and an example of the human body’s brilliance, and excellence and functionality. When those who are supporting a woman during birth recognize this, and can celebrate this while offering the birthing mother compassion, love and empathy—without pity—the woman herself can much more easily herself, tap into the reality of birth as the triumph that it is.

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For more about the power of birth, download my free e-book guide to an ecstatic, physiological, autonomous home birth, here.