*

Pregnancy, birth and parenting have done a lot for my patience muscle.  Motherhood is all in patience.  Pregnancy is a study in waiting.  In my work supporting other pregnant women, I find myself reassuring other mothers that the strangeness and uncertainty and sometimes-discomfort of pregnancy is normal, and useful.

 *

In a meeting yesterday, I accidentally described the unknowingness, the mystery, and yes, the patience that biology imposes, as “spiritually nutritious”.  This will be problematic for many, I know, but it is true for me.  Sharing our stories is what makes a family, a sisterhood, a movement.  One mother I met with recently expressed so perfectly the paradox of pregnancy and birth.  She feels the pull to succumb to the temptation of technology.  Despite the speciousness of ultrasound, its inarticulate failure of insight, ultrasound  does nonetheless beguilingly signify in our culture Looking, Seeing, Knowing.  This wise mother herself, recognized her wavering as the voice of doubt and fear.  But she also spoke of another layer of consciousness, a deep wisdom on a cellular level, a presence she can feel.  She knows how to give birth because she is a human woman.  Lucy and the Venus of Willendorf are *actually* a part of You.

 *

Being pregnant, giving life, birthing, and then caring for our children, is a constant balance of strength and surrender.  The trembling, tentative, febrile, emotional embodiment of exhaustion that is early pregnancy;  the galvanizing impetus to make and do during the second trimester; the slowness, inward gaze and heaviness of imminent birth.

 *

Technology does not liberate us from nature.  We can sublimate the primal motions and sensations of birth, but the result of this will still be felt in our bodies somehow.  You will feel something now, you will feel something later, or maybe you will miss the feeling as another kind of pain.  There will always be a trade-off.  For some, this may be felt as a penalty.  Biology cannot not be repressed.  Every single disruption of the normal course of birth creates a corresponding effect in the body/mind/connection of mother, baby, and mother-baby dyad.  This is not a moral judgement, not at all.  This is the science and the physiology of birth.  This is the truth that is imprinted by the flow of oxytocin (the hormone of love) through our bodies when we birth unhindered.  The alternative is numbness and dumb pitocin, and the fog of machinery.  That there are painful and dangerous consequences to interfering with birth is well-known.  But the degree to which these consequences may effect our lives, or our genetic material, and for how long, has yet to be revealed.

 *

I want my three-year old daughter, Treva, to have true reproductive freedom.  I want her to experience true gender equality and bodily integrity.  This means complete authority over her body, and the decisions made surrounding how, where and with whom she gives birth.  At this time, in 2013, there are few places if any, on this planet (and certainly none in North America) where women have sovereignty over their own pregnant and birthing bodies.

 *

It is very strange to me that my (and your) simple decision to proceed through pregnancy without any diagnostic testing, or external technological validation, or any outside authority, is, at this time in history, an outrageous, rare, and frequently vilified act of rebellion and political struggle.

 *

Pregnancy and birth are, after all, the very definition of our humanity, our existence, life.