Undomesticated Birth

In praise of more primeval beginnings

Birth is like an all-knowing, all-consuming character to me- wisdom and beauty and fury and divine purpose manifested into this beast of an experience. Because birth is an experience-it happens to you. The woman is a vehicle for the sensation necessary to propel another human into this life. Birth happens whether or not the woman consents, contractions begin when the body and the baby communicate in a thousand ancient and unknown languages and conclude it is time-the woman’s thinking mind is not invited to this conversation. When allowed to unfold naturally, the fetal ejection reflex is just that-a reflex, a primitive thing. And we, in those moments, are the primitive beings so many of us prefer to forget we are.

I have birthed in the hospital with an OB. I have been a Labor and Delivery Nurse and caught babies. I have received care at a birthing center and I have received care from a CPM. I have given birth unassisted twice, once much more intentionally than the other. I have had what many call a totally “wild pregnancy”. I have freebirthed a breech baby in my bathroom. I have even attended other women’s unassisted births as well- as a watchful eye-nothing more, nothing less. I am well-versed in this ultimate work of women, and I only find it more and more special as I grow older.

It is because of my intimate knowing of the specialness of this experience that I am invariably in favor of protecting it in its most ancient and true form. It is equally due to my personal and professional experiences that I feel this way. I know what sabotage of the female spirit looks like. I know what disrespect to new life looks like. I also know what the honorable upholding of this same spirit and of that same new life looks like. The difference is a woman born into motherhood broken or a woman born into motherhood healed and whole.

Pain can make us whole and surrender can make us trust, and the combination of walking through the veil of them both is like a baptism in the essence of creation itself. Our entire culture and the medical system that informs that culture on this topic robs us of this. It has made us fearful, with a distaste for any sort of pain or inconvenience or mess.

We need to get over it.

The unpredictable timing and the uncontrollable pain and the unruly bloody mess of birth illuminate for us that we are not the ultimate masters of our environments or bodies. And allowing these things, rather than fighting them, makes this fact okay. How freeing it truly is when you are able to know this.

I don’t know why this is, but I have always had a very opposing distaste, and it is for people who cannot handle pain or blood or dirt. People who are worried about being polite. The kind of men who need to shower immediately after sex. The sort of person who sprays Round-Up on Dandelions. People who wince when you describe an injury. Maybe I’m mean, maybe I just have no patience for fussiness. All I know is that I have always been very pro “HUMANS ARE ANIMALS”, while still recognizing our special place in the mammalian royal kingdom due to our special human talents such as logic and problem-solving and self-control and the like.

This attitude made unassisted childbirth seem obvious to me. I, like many, was indoctrinated by The Freebirth Society (I very purposefully linked the episode with the brilliant MaryLou Singleton of

Enchanted Family Medicine

here), but the impulses were there already, written into my being through my trial-by-fire first hospital birth and my experiences as a L&D nurse. I’m a natural homebody as well, and I truly see the value in birthing where we have some emotional-muscle-memory.

So today, I want to share my latest birth story, one I wrote not too long after she was born. My surprise breechling freebirth of my little Elora Arabelle, who has lived up to her origin story in every way. A birth of corporeal reminders, of fear release, and of unadulterated purity and love.