Birth in the New Millenium

by Kara Maia Spencer, LMT, CD, www.MaiaHealingArts.com

 

We live in an unprecedented time in human history. Humanity faces incredible challenges and also great possibility. We can no longer ignore the fact that humans are interdependent, and completely reliant upon the Earth. The one experience that every human has in common with one another is that we are all born.

Birth is transforming. The way a newborn is birthed and cared for in the primal period of life, from conception to the first birthday, has rippling effects through physical health, psycho-emotional health, and spiritual wellness. For millennia, midwives have been the guardians of normal instinctive birth.

Midwifery is the healing art of being ‘with woman’, and is founded upon a deep connection to nature and spirit.  Midwives honor the blood mysteries: menarche, childbearing, and menopause, as sacred and powerful life transitions. The World Health Organization (WHO) states the midwives are the safest care-providers for low-risk, healthy pregnant women.

Midwives provide women-centered care to their childbearing community from fertility awareness, conception, pregnancy, labor, postpartum, and through fertility again. Traditional midwives serve women in their homes, to have natural un-medicated births. Certified Professional Midwives work with women at home or at free-standing birth centers, and Certified Nurse-Midwives work in hospitals, birth centers, and at home.

In indigenous cultures worldwide, women are attended in pregnancy and labor by older female relatives or the village midwife. Klaus, Kennel, and Klaus, the authors of Mothering the Mother, reviewed birth customs in 128 non-industrialized hunting and gathering and agricultural cultures, and in all but one of them women attended women in childbirth. The exception to female supported labor was likely solitary, unassisted birth, as Michel Odent believes that unassisted birth is typical of pre-agricultural societies.

Birth is not simply a physiological process - it is an emotional, spiritual, psychological, and social rite-of-passage. The way people birth their babies has lasting effects, throughout the child’s life, and for the generations that follow. An informed, positive, empowered birth experience is not only healthy for mothers and babies - it is essential for social change and the well-being of future generations. Giving birth is a life-changing event.

Our cultural consciousness is experiencing a great awakening. People are embracing a new model of co-creative culture; eschewing mainstream philosophies and practices to follow their intuition and make individual decisions for their families based on heart-felt choices. With this rising awareness we are developing a new form of midwifery that is fluent in evidence-based research and women’s traditional healing wisdom.

Humanity needs midwives to consciously birth a sustainable global community that honors nature, wisdom, and peace. We need gentle and instinctive birth, to emerge as a harmonious earth culture. The tremors we are feeling in our society and through planetary activity is Mama Earth’s labor. Gaia is giving birth to the future.