Reflection on the Sacredness of Childbirth

An excerpt from The Mother Consciousness:


I soon found myself attending a woman’s group where I sat passively listening to a dialogue about pregnancy and birth experiences. “Why is it,” I wondered, “that every time someone found out that you were expecting they had to share their opinion on the topic?” As I listened further, I began to understand that the childbearing experience often was what someone else had dictated it to be. Many mothers mindlessly accepted other’s perceptions simply as their own.

On that particular night the topic covered planning nonemergency C-sections to orchestrate their infant’s birth around their husbands’ time off and opting for an epidural. “How barbaric is it that anyone would refuse an epidural? She would have to be sadistic or something, wouldn’t she?” complained one woman who had just found out that she, too, was pregnant with her first child. Just a few weeks pregnant and already she knew that she would opt for the epidural. Here I was, well into my fifth month, still exploring what the childbirth experience would look like for me.

I was diligently weighing my options, battling with what culture said was the right thing to do while having this conflicting innate pull to create a unique natural birth story for our unborn child. I found myself realizing that these women could not even consider for a moment that the birthing process was a part of the rite of passage into their motherhood. They sat there discussing this as a routine medical procedure while I sat there stupefied, almost enraged, that none of them considered the sacredness of the birthing process.