"I don't care how you get it out of me"

Friday, warm, sunny--finally got the Saturn all repaired and road-worthy

Last night, my aunt called me to "check up on me" and see how I was doing. She does this periodically and I'm grateful for it. We got to discussing my midwife choices, and surprisingly, she seemed to think that a homebirth with a midwife was a viable and safe (as far as birth goes) option. I'm thankful that her daughter, my cousin, seems to have influenced her knowledge and opinion in the matter. It also helps that my second child was born in the backseat of the car and my family knows I am "capable" because of it.

Over the course of the conversation, she was telling me about her birth experiences (which I welcome as my own mother isn't alive to tell me hers) and how traumatizing her first birth was--36 hours, ending in a cesarean that was poorly done, when they were still rather rare by today's norm.

She said that, when it came time for her second child's birth, the doctors told her she could try for another normal birth or opt for a repeat C-section and her response was "I don't care how you get it out of me, as long as I'm knocked out when you do it!"

...  ...

My first reaction was a deep desire to hug her and wish that she had never been through something so painfully awful. And then I felt sad that there are many women, all over the country, who also feel that birth is nothing more than a means to an end, and if you can skip it entirely, then why the hell not? The number of Cesareans is now at about 1 in 3 in the US and 1 in 2 in China and still rising. Given that doctors are less likely to allow women to try to VBAC (vaginal birth after Cesarean), combined with a pervasive ideology that women should just lay on the table and let the doctor (who knows best) tell her what her body is doing, it's no wonder we are starting to feel a backlash.

Women who have given birth naturally, powerfully, fully aware of their own bodies, are speaking out against the torrent of medicalized birth. "Of course, some women need Cesareans!" they shout, "but not all of them, not all of us!" Some of us would wish for every woman to experience the transformative, powerful, primal experience of natural birth, to feel they way the Mother felt as she brought into being from her own soul, her own Power.

When I was at the Christopher Penczak workshop, he started talking about how creating Magick is a lot like giving birth. We start with an idea, a desire, we act upon it, we draw the energies, form it, and after a lot of work, we send it out to do its purpose.

I began wondering about the reciprocal of this idea. Is giving birth a lot like Magick? Any woman who has done both will tell you with much head nodding and affirmation "YES!" I wonder what we are doing to our collective, and personal, psyche by taking the Magick out of birth. Will we discover in 20 years that our meddling in the affairs of Nature (on a whole and often without real need) has created a Magickal void? We know there are physical and psychological differences in a baby born by Cesarean and one born naturally, bacteria and hormones that are released only through the birth canal...wouldn't it stand to reason that Energetic changes also occur during this process, not only for the baby, but also for the Mother?

Any woman who has given birth naturally will tell you instinctively that the answer is definitely yes.

What saddens me is the number of women who are, and will continue, to dismiss this possibility completely, with no more than an "I don't care how you get it out of me." We should care. Mothers, daughters, Fathers, sons, Magicians, Witches, Shamans and everyone in between. Whether you've got kids or not, we should be advocating for a world that values natural birth, saving Cesareans for those rare, few times when they really are *needed* and I can assure you, it is much, much less than one out of every three births.