Vision of Unity

I have been disturbed by all of the antagonism, fighting, gossip, and divisiveness that envelops childbirth. So many of the choices surrounding birth are framed in terms of polarized debates: home versus hospital...midwives versus doctors...epidural versus "natural" childbirth...assisted versus unassisted. Rarely does either party walk away having accomplished anything positive. We wield studies and statistics like clubs, hoping that we can intimidate each other into submission by sheer force or volume or rhetorical ingenuity. We hurl horror stories at each other: woman catches fire during her cesarean! baby dies during a breech homebirth! two best friends die after their cesareans! woman loses both arms and legs after giving birth in a hospital!

I cannot take part in this violent war of words. Mothering has transformed me. I never knew that I could love so passionately and so completely. Happy Sad Mama's words echo my own feelings: "I love my kids so much, so intensely much, and I am so grateful for them that my image that flies past the blackness of my eyelids when I think too hard about this love is of me lying, face-down, on the ground reaching up for them. I want them so intensely interwoven with me, I feel absolutely addicted to them and entranced by them and I just can't imagine that everyone else in the world feels this way because I am almost CRAZY with the love and addiction for them."

When I was pregnant with my daughter, I felt an intense inner need to give birth to her at home, in privacy. When a reporter from Grazia magazine was interviewing me last spring, I unexpectedly broke into tears as I was telling her how I had wanted Zari to be born in an atmosphere of love, knowing only the warmth of her parents' arms. I am not a crier, usually. I didn't cry at my daughter's birth. I was calm. Intensely happy, of course, too, as you can see in the videos right after her birth.

I feel a kinship with Sarah Buckley in this regard. She too felt a strong inner pull that her fourth baby needed to be birthed at home, into the presence of her own family: "Our baby’s birth was to be witnessed only by the family--there had been a strong feeling from the start that this was what this baby wanted....There was also a simple, domestic feeling to this pregnancy--no need for outside activity or people--and I felt keenly this baby’s love of family." The birth story is definitely worth reading, by the way.

Love is a tremendous motivating force. I challenge you to join me in transforming our verbal swords into plowshares. Let's turn the endless debates into something more beautiful and more useful: a Vision of Unity.

VISION of UNITY
by Jeannine Parvati Baker

Like many of us, I have been praying with my ears, listening to midwives all around the world.
How can we (wo)manifest the vision of unity that would serve families?
Meditating upon the divisions between birth attendants, a vision came to me.
I saw a circle wherein the tribes called to heal the Earth by healing birth sat together.
It was a medicine wheel, with all styles of midwifery and obstetrics represented.
Across the wheel from me sat a medical doctor.
To each of my sides were medwives and CNM's, seated across from one another.
We defined the cardinal points in the wheel, but were not the whole circle.
From where I sat, I could see directly what was behind the doctor, and visa versa.
To either side I had an oblique angle to view my sister medwives and CNM's.
Then I realized why we needed one another. It is to keep us honest.
I can see what is the shadow of obstetrics, as the good doctor can see the shadow freebirth casts.
Nurses and medwives add to the bigger picture across the wheel from one another.
No one can turn around and see ones own shadow alone. This is how we serve one another.
All of us who attend birth are holograms in this circle of life. Each has the whole truth about birth within.
When we bring our versions of the truth together, there is a finer resolution and
multi-dimensional viewing into the great round of being.
In my vision, we are sitting in birth's circle, representing our various tribes.
Not my circle, not yours, but birth's circle.
Each tribe, each perspective, is precious to birth.
Together the living oracle will be voiced through all of us.
Let it be the voice of what the Earth needs through each of us.
Remembering this always: What we do to one, we do to all.

(http://www.freestone.org/hygieia)