Compassionate Birth

07/07/2022

It's not your fault & there's nothing wrong with you....

These are words that I said to a mother this morning and I still can't believe that I have to say them.

She is four months postpartum and is overwhelmed with feelings of brokenness after an intensely traumatic birth. She is navigating new motherhood and all that goes with it. Birth, as it does, also brought to the surface woundings and wrongdoings from her own childhood. And on top of all of that she is processing an emergency cesarean that resulted in the loss of her uterus.

And she is doing it alone.

It is the paradox of my work. To feel honored that I get the privilege to witness mothers in their vulnerability and to be there for them, with an open and compassionate heart, while holding within a deep seated anger at the inadequacy and brokenness of our maternity care system.

As I left her house today my heart grieved for all of the mothers that are alone in their homes with their newborn babies, hurting in silence and believing that their traumatic birth was somehow their fault. That somehow they did something to cause such a catastrophic outcome.

Today I heard this mother say "I feel like I let my baby down," and "I don't know what I did to cause this," and "I'm worried that I'm not a good enough mother for her."

This is unacceptable. We, as a society, are failing new families. We are leaving them broken and alone with no way through to the other side. We are disabling them and as a result, disabling ourselves.

We can do better. We have to do better.

In four months I am the first person who looked this mother in the eyes and said "you didn't do anything wrong." And she stared back at me, her eyes searching my face, her heart soaking in those words. As she continued to tell her story she said, "I knew there was something wrong but they wouldn't listen to me. They kept telling me everything was fine and my baby was fine. But I knew that wasn't true."

I told her, "you knew. I'm sorry that nobody listened to you. I'm sorry that you were alone in your knowing."

And you know what? That is the place that I work with the most in postpartum integration sessions. The place where the mother *intuitively knew* what was needed but was ignored and abandoned. Almost always, that is the primary rupture.

Because the modern maternity care model operates in a top down way, where the physician is an external authority figure and the mother is meant to obey, many times births end in a traumatic way because the information that lives within the mother is dismissed and overridden in favor of a technocratic model that sees the body as a machine and birth as a thing to be dominated and contained.

And if that isn't bad enough...

We have completely severed the connection of body/mind/spirit from birth and disregard anything that falls outside of the window of biological understanding. Mothers are pushed through and spat out on the other side, left feeling fragmented and broken even though they tried...

They tried so hard to do it right. To follow the wisdom of their body. To erect their inner knowing and allow it to lead them. They tried to find God in their process, but around every bend there was always The Man telling them to be silent and to let the technocracy win.

How to you compete with that? A single being facing an entity that demands your submission?

The only choice is to self-abandon.

I am faced with this everyday. Staring the destruction and desecration of the sacred square in the face.

And the only thing I can do is look in the eyes of each mother and say, "I see you."

It is a tragedy, truly. And something must be done. Women and children are the backbone of society, if they're broken, then I believe that life as we know it is done.

If you know a mother who has recently given birth, please bring her a meal today and let her know she is not alone.

If we wish to change this tide, we must all rise, together, and recenter The Mother instead of The Man.

Art: Mother Embrace by Kate Ahn

07/02/2022

Hello! 👋 It's been a long while since I posted here. Many of you probably started following me as 'Rebecca Rambo-Birthkeeper' back when I began writing about the premature birth of my 4th child. I've birthed again since then, and as you might expect, that birth was also powerful and a story worth sharing (as all births are).

Yesterday I sat at this seat and had a very powerful interview with for her podcast, Speaking Light Into Abortion.

I told the story of the death and birth of my baby, Arrow Sage. Our story together was a meant to be journey of intentional pregnancy release and it was a journey that catapulted me into a space of deep self-reclamation.

I haven’t spoken about it yet, because it was so precious and tender. I have been sitting with the medicine of that birth for over 2 years, and with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, I felt that now is the right time to share this wisdom.

Abortion is birth. And birth is always sacred. When we birth, we are offered an opportunity for transformation.

The episode will be released on Tuesday and I hope that our story reaches the hearts of those who need it most in this strange and unsettling time.
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You'll notice that the name of this page has changed. It is my intention here to begin sharing inquiries and explorations around the ideas of supporting all birthing families well and what it actually means to meet the journey of birth with compassion. How can we, as a collective, reduce harm and access the inherent transformative nature of birth?
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I have two other podcast interviews I've done in recent months that I will link in the comments below! Please check them out and share your thoughts. It is the conversations we have that spark the changes we all desire!

06/29/2022

08/19/2021

Consent actually matters
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Touching someone’s body, but especially sensitive bits like genitalia, without explicit consent is not within a practitioners scope of practice ever. It literally does not matter what kind of letters are behind your name or what role you have in your clients/patients experience or why they’ve come to see you.

Asking for permission when someone is already in a position of vulnerability does NOT equal consent. Telling someone they need to comply with something because of policy is not consent. Leading the questions with love by saying things such as “for the benefit of your baby we’d like to do a vaginal exam. Is that okay?” is also NOT consent.

In birth gaining full consent for a vaginal exam during birth, for example, sounds like having discussions about vaginal exams (risks, benefits, when they may be of use to the laboring person etc) with the client fully clothed, well before the onset of labor, in a place where they feel safe and respected. You have a full discussion, you ask about their concerns and overall feelings about vaginal exams, offering ideas for alternatives, explaining exactly how the exam will happen etc. Most importantly you assure them that they NEVER have to consent to a vaginal exam and that the choice is FULLY theirs, regardless of why you are wanting to do one.

Then, if it seems like a vaginal exam may be useful in labor you must first return to those initial conversations, be fully transparent, leave room for TRUE choice, etc before ever “gloving up”. You must gain a full “yes, I want you to do a vaginal exam.” You May even need to pose the question, offer the information, answer questions, and then leave the room while they make their decision.

If they consent, you again describe the process in detail. Then you ask again, “are you ready for me to begin? I will start by putting my gloves on.” Then you announce EACH AND EVERY STEP prior to doing it. You go slow. You gain consent over and over. “My fingers are at your opening. Are you ready for me to put them inside?? Yes, ok. Now they are inside and I am reaching to feel your cervix and your baby’s head. Does this still feel okay? You can tell me to stop at any time?” You notice their breathing. You watch their body for signs of tension. You attune to their experience and you are always, always willing to stop at the first moment of consent being withdrawn.

You also talk to the baby!! You let them know who you are, what you’re doing entering their body (because moms body is their body too), you ask them for consent, you let them know when you’ve made contact with them too... “hi baby, I feel your head. You’re doing such a great job. I’d like to see what position you’re birthing yourself in. I’m checking in to see how your moms body is opening and if there’s anything I need to be aware of. Do you need me to know anything baby?”

Afterwards you stay with them. You stay in the space. You offer a hand on their hand. You take breaths and feel your own body. You ask them if they’d like to know what you felt. You thank them for consenting to gathering this information from their body.

Why is this not common practice?

WE CAN DO BETTER!! We HAVE to do better!!

07/19/2021

“That’s just the way it is” and other excuses I’m unwilling to believe.

05/29/2021

Parents are the original baby monitors.

We are designed keep our infants close. Even while we sleep, our bodies monitor and nurture our young. Our nearness promotes bonding, facilitates brain development, and regulates the nervous system. Infants are incapable of surviving without us, so the need to be close is also a hard-wired safety mechanism.

Humans are born earlier in their gestation than other mammals. We enter the world far less developed and far more helpless. A newborn calf can stand up within the first 2 hours after birth...human babies can’t even hold their own heads up until around 3 or 4 months old.

And if we look to our closest cousins, chimpanzees, for comparison…a human baby would need a 18-21 month gestation, rather than our usual 9-10, in order to be born at a comparable cognitive and neurological stage of development to that of a newborn chimpanzee. So our young toddlers aren’t even ready to cut the cord by chimp standards…

So, once earthside, we continue our gestation with the help of our parents. We stay rooted to our parents so that our bodies and minds may continue developing, in constant communication with theirs.

That is why its so troubling when our culture’s separation-focused narrative leads us to start second-guessing the value of proximity. It seems like we get our free pass for the newborn phase, but then after that there’s a bit of distaste for cosleeping or carrying or generally embracing high needs for closeness. I hope we can start to change that.

I hope that we can view proximity as something to honour as much as we can, rather than something to extinguish as early as possible.

That, instead of being considered a kind of lagging-behind or an alt parenting style, we can celebrate the magic that it is...

That we can reconnect with our mammalian nature, and, rather than feeling sheepish about these natural things we do, we can choose instead to roar with pride about them, as our little cubs roar too, right by our sides.

Words: https://instagram.com/realkindparent?utm_medium=copy_link
Image: https://instagram.com/moonandcheeze?utm_medium=copy_link
Shared from Instagram: https://instagram.com/realkindparent?utm_medium=copy_link

05/28/2021

Dear Maternity Care Providers Who Work in a Hospital: ________________________________________________

Stop being critical of, condescending to, and judgmental towards people who come into your hospital to receive care after transferring from a home birthing environment. You’re not convincing anybody that hospital birth is the best choice by being hostile and terrible to the people who show up in an emergent situation from a home birth. What you’re doing is you’re teaching people that it’s not safe to seek care.

Your inability to receive home birth transfers with compassion and integrity is reflective of your unwillingness to practice humanity-centered and trauma-informed care. You’re taking a person who is probably at the cliff’s edge of the most traumatic and vulnerable experience of their life, and you’re kicking them when they’re down.

You’re not changing anything, you’re making home birth more dangerous. People aren’t going to stop birthing at home because the doctor, upon transfer, shamed them for making the choice to birth outside of the system. No, what they’re going to do is stop seeking care.

Stop treating the people who show up from home births as train wrecks. They’re not train wrecks, they’re responsible. Birth happens anywhere. And everywhere. Everybody deserves the opportunity to choose how they would like to enter in to parenthood; how they would like to birth.

Now that choice may not reflect your professional opinion or what you would choose for yourself. But medicine has no place for personal opinions and personal views to influence the care you provide. The hippocratic oath eludes to the idea of “do no harm” over its many paragraphs outlining morality in medicine.

That doesn’t just mean do no harm physically, to someone’s sick, injured, or dying body. No, people are far more complex than bodies. Do no harm means: do no harm to their psyche, their spirit, their emotional experience. Birth is meant to be a rite of passage, a critical juncture between ‘life before’ and ‘life after.’ A point of profound transformation, regardless of how they arrive at the gateway. Birth is sacred and holy, in all of the messy ways it shows up.

It doesn’t quite matter what circumstances led to the transfer, it doesn’t really matter what happened until the point they show up at your emergency room or on your maternity care floor. What matters is how you’re receiving them. What matters is that you’re able to give them compassionate, kind, competent care despite how they’ve chosen to give birth.

When you do anything less that that, you’re bullying. Stop it. There’s no place for bullies in medicine.

As someone who has supported many families in their journey of birthing at home, the one thing I can tell you is that those families care deeply about the safety and well-being of their child. They are willing to go completely against status quo, to be the lone wolf, the outcast in order to achieve and offer their child the birth experience that they think is best.

Home birthers aren’t crazy. Home birthers aren’t irresponsible. Home birthers aren’t science deniers, or new age lunatics. Home birthers are people. People that you agreed to support, care for, and protect when you set foot on this path.

When you’re compounding their trauma by indulging in your own ego-centered perspective on how they’re chosen to live their life and birth their children you’re not serving anyone, you’re causing harm.

Please, stop it, now!

When somebody walks into your hospital or arrives in an ambulance in a state of crisis after birthing or attempting to birth their child at home, look upon them with a warm, open heart and kindness in your eyes, and help them navigate through the trickiest waters they’ve ever found themselves swimming, or nearly drowning, in. See them to the other side.

And if you can’t do that, choose to practice medicine on another floor. Or take a sabbatical and sit with the people. Listen to their stories. Find your humanity, and then return to serving with a humbled heart.

(Photo: an exhausted mom (me) who transferred to birth at the hospital after receiving alternative care her whole pregnancy. This is the face of a mother in a shock and trauma response, trying to care for her premature infant, while being faced with intense hostility from hospital staff including blatant bullying, neglectful care, and a report to the State Child Protective Services)

03/17/2021

What is evidence-based care and what does it mean if a birth worker offers you a evidence-based support? Is care that is not evidence-based inferior or unsafe?

Do you think “evidence-based” should be the standard in care during the childbearing continuum?

02/19/2021

I cannot wait to see this documentary! The part where she says we need to dismantle the entire system and start again... YES! Odent has been saying that for years and years.

I agree,

https://youtu.be/0vXkYqTPvKM

TICKETS NOW ON SALE - https://www.birthtime.worldBirth Time: the documentary - Three women embark on a mission to find out why an increasing number of women ...

02/18/2021

In pregnancy and birth, what does it mean if a provider offers “evidence based care”??

02/05/2021

Returning Birth to Mothers
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Birth is safest when a mother is well nurtured and free to traverse altered states of consciousness without outside influence or interference

Anything that interferes with this presents a direct danger to mother, baby, and the birthing process. The process of birth begins at conception.

✨ If we want to make birth safer it is imperative that we return birth to Mothers ✨

Rather that focusing our maternity care on active management and risk assessment, I propose we turn to nurturing mothers in their wholeness: mind, body, and soul.

It is through this act of nurturing that we facilitate the natural unfolding of the physiological process of child birth.

When birth is free to unfold as divine design intended, mothers are free to venture into altered states where all the information (and instincts!) they need to birth their babies is available.

If a [welll-meaning, because I believe they all are] support person disrupts this process of nurturing and psychadelic journeying (with advice, doubt, fear, observation, testing etc) they are very directly compromising the integrity of this divine intelligence that directs the flow of life force energy and birth. This interference creates very real danger for the mother-baby dyad.

Let us treat pregnant people as sacred, holy beings. For it is they who are brave enough to open their vessels wide enough to allow the entire Universe to pass through them. It is they who are willing to walk into the fire of transformation that is birth.

May we be wise enough to stand aside and trust them with this most honorable work.
May we be humble enough to silently witness their journey with reverence and awe.
And may we be compassionate enough to tend to them without interfering.

Birth *is* transformation... and Goddess knows our World needs a whole lot of that!

(Art: 'An Angel is Born' by The Visionary Art of Nicole Mizoguchi)

01/13/2021

Women are out there trusting themselves and claiming their space and birthing vertex, twins, and breech babies at home ALONE! They’re doing it without asking permission and without conflict about their choices.

Rather than admonishing these families for making “dangerous choices” we should be looking at them in awe and inquiring deeply as to WHY they are making this choice in the face of modern maternity care.

It’s time for the system overhaul to become radically woman and family LED. Not just woman-centered.., but actually DIRECTED by the people birthing the babies and everyone else follows along and adapts to them. Every single day birthing people are showing us that they don’t need anything from anyone in order to give birth to their babies. It’s about time we trust them to guide us and show up to witness their incredible strength and power.

This model will make birth the safest it can be.

Photo: a powerful mama birthing her baby at home on her own terms, held by a very attuned papa, the Archangel of the Family.

01/12/2021

"Ronald Laing (1977) often said that birth and conception are opposite sides of the same coin, and that conception traumas have their way of coming up during birth, and influence how birth is experienced. So conception trauma leads to birth trauma."
. ."A sizable group of European mental health professionals in the 1970s, led by psychiatrists R.D. Laing and Frank Lake, contended that prenatal memories were the most influential because they were the first. This perspective is apparent in Laing’s (1976) book entitled The Facts of Life, where he says, “The environment is registered from the very beginning of my life; by the first one [cell] of me. What happens to the first one or two of me may reverberate throughout all subsequent generations of our first cellular parents. That first one of us carries all my ‘genetic’ memories” (p. 30). He goes on to say,
 It seems to me credible, at least, that all our experience in our life cycle from cell one is absorbed and stored from the beginning, perhaps especially in the beginning. How that may happen I do not know. How can one cell generate the billions and billions of cells I now am? We are impossible, but for the fact that we are. When I look at the embryological stages in my life cycle I experience what feels to me like sympathetic vibrations in me now . . . how I now feel I felt then. (p.36)."

“Woman is the artist of the imagination and the child in the womb is the canvas whereon she painteth her pictures” Paracelsus (1493-1541)

01/10/2021

I have a story about pushing my babies out...

I had my first child just after I turned 20. I was but a baby myself. I had a strong desire for natural child birth but had little direction or support for achieving that. I learned about midwives in the book, What to Expect When You're Expecting. I chose a hospital based midwifery practice because I didn't yet know homebirth existed. Overall, I felt very comfortable with them and, due to my own ignorance, didn't know what I was missing or how my birth might be compromised by their management.

I mostly trusted my body. I had a very fundamental belief that my body knew how to have a baby and had no reason to fear that I would need an epidural or a cesarean section.

In the end, I birthed my son vaginally and unmedicated. But that experience was still about as far from physiologic birth as one could get.

My aunt was at the hospital with us. She was a high school teacher and graduation just happened to fall on the day that I was birthing. I had been laboring for about 9 hours and she was wondering whether or not to go to the 2 hour graduation ceremony. Because I really wanted her present for the birth (she was taking photos) I asked for a yoni exam to see how much progress my body had made towards birthing.

I remember laying on my back, under the bright lights of the hospital room, when the midwife removed her hand from my yoni and looked around the room wide eyed and playful. She declared that I was "10 CENTIMETERS WITH A BABY ON THE WAY!" I was relieved to know that all that work was for something, but I did not feel like pushing. I did not feel ready to meet my baby yet.

What I didn't know then was that 10 centimeters of dilation is not necessarily complete. I didn't know that my baby needed to move past the gateway of cervical opening and do a slight rotation. I didn't know that my baby needed to extend his own head under my p***c bone and to the opening of my yoni before my body would desire to birth him through ejecting pushes. And apparently my midwife didn't know that either.

Because what happened was that I arose out of bed wild with energy, moving and shifting, swaying my hips, vomiting, and just generally feeling a stirring of cosmic pulsations moving through me as my body finished opening so that my baby could descend down and out. I was still in transition.

It was then that I was reminded that I should start pushing now! No time for allowing my body to finish it's process. 10 centimeters! It's go time!

I pushed for two hours. Halfway through I became so exhausted I needed to lay down. I couldn't sustain the coached pushing with each contraction and remain upright. It felt harder laying on my back. I was pushing with all my might. Purple face, veins popping out, dizzy and disoriented between contractions. All the while people around me were saying "you've got this! Just a little harder. Good, now hold that one. Don't let him slide back in. PUSH!"

I pushed for two hours, but not because I was a first time mom or because my body didn't know how to give birth. Simply because my care provider was misinformed and didn't give me the space and time to allow for nature to take it's course.

I birthed at home with my second child. Throughout the whole pregnancy I felt deeply afraid of pushing. I still had an unwavering belief that my body knew what to do, but once again my care provider did not. It was more of the same. Yoni exam revealed 10 centimeters and the midwife told me (more gently) that it was time to push. I pushed for two hours. It was painful and exhausting. It was traumatizing for my baby and I.

I wondered afterwards how midwives could have such trust in the first part of labor but have such a deep belief that women needed to be directed to push? Did I really just not know how? Was force and exertion the way a baby had to come out? I still didn't know the physiology that I do now...

It was my third birth that taught me that babies birth themselves. I chose to birth that baby unassisted because I was determined to avoid the medical trauma I had previously endured and really truly trust my body to do this thing. My previous care providers taught me that I had more faith in my process than anyone else, and so, I chose to birth on my own terms.

You know what happened without anyone telling me my body was ready to push?? I got to "complete" after a wild ride of transition and then guess what? I LAID DOWN ON THE COUCH AND WENT TO SLEEP. Yes, I slept mid labor, with my babies head nestled down in my pelvis. My body and mind rested in preparation to receive my baby.

When I awoke my waters release and I felt my baby slide under my p***c bone and into my birth canal. I felt him wiggling his head and shifting his shoulders with he worked his way down. I felt him extend the crown of his head to the opening of my yoni and found my way onto the floor. I called out to my husband "the baby is coming!" And he helped me take a few steps over to the pool.

In the water I stayed upright and opened my knees wide. I felt my uterus pushing down against his tiny bum. Undulations of pressure.. down, wiggle, open, pause... down, shift, open, pause... And before I knew it his head had emerged from the darkness. I reached down and touched him, thanked him, let him know I was there, and then I waited.

I felt his shoulder slide around and under my p***c bone and then as my uterus was gently pushing down,I felt him as he pushed back with his feet and kicked brought himself into the world.

AND I DIDN'T HAVE TO DO A THING. There was no doing, only witnessing and receiving.

For a long while after that birth I felt angry at what the midwives had taken from me and my babies during my previous birth. As I've learned more physiology and deepened in my trust of birth, that anger has dissolved into compassion. You don't know what you don't know...

BUT YOU CAN LEARN!

The body of a birthing person and a baby contain a blueprint for this process. Learn it, know it, trust it.

Photo: My third child and I during our Return from birth.