I am a Doula. I am a mother. I am a woman. And I am frustrated beyond belief when I look around me at the number of women I have encountered who were disappointed by their birth experience or worse, traumatized. We have been fed and swallowed the lie that we need a trained surgeon to attend a normal life procedure. We have bought the lie that we are weak and incapable of giving birth naturally and without intervention. If we were that weak and incapable the human race would be a whole lot smaller than it is now! We look back at how many used to die in childbirth and shudder, but really, most of those deaths were due to infection from poor hygiene. I think we're past that now.
We were also fed the lie that home-birth midwives were uneducated women with no training and dirty hands. Hello, 21st century here. Statistically a women with no risks is safer giving birth at home than in a hospital because the midwife is not inclined to intervene unnecessarily.
There are many wonderful professionals out there striving to educate women and bring back normal birth, but are swimming against the tide. Birth is becoming more and more medicalized and de-humanized as is evidenced by our national c-section rate of over 30% and our international ranking for maternal infant outcomes of 42nd in the world.
So I ask each of you who read this:
Why are we approaching this so quietly and meekly?
Why aren't we yelling at the top of our lungs for change?
Why aren't we marching on Washington D.C. and demanding change?
Have we all become so passive and numb that we have lost our voices?
I hate feeling like nothing I can do will change things, but we all know that there is power in numbers and that sometimes you have to scream to be heard.
So I challenge those of you out there who want change to put your heads together and find your voices and
START SCREAMING!!!!!!!
God Bless,
Suzann