More Babies Prefer Home Birth

Dr. Michelle Harrison, M.D. (who is a family practitioner and did residency work in OB/GYN) will make us all do some reflective thinking.

“Imagine dancers on a stage. Once, doing a pirouette, a woman sustained a cervical fracture as a result of a fall; she is now paralyzed. We try to make the stage safer, to have the dancers better prepared. But can a dancer wear a collar around her neck, just in case she falls? The presence of the collar will inhibit her free motion. We cannot say to her, ‘This will be entirely natural except for the brace on your neck, just in case.’ It cannot be “as if” it is not there, because we know that creative movement and creative expression cannot exist with those constraints. The dancer cannot dance with the brace on. In the same way, the birthing woman cannot “dance” with a brace on. The straps around her abdomen, the wires coming from her vagina, change her birth.

The birthing woman plays in an orchestra of her body, her soul, her baby, her loved ones, her past and her future. And we do not know who leads the orchestra.

Doctors cannot lead the orchestra, because they are not within the process. Unable to hear the music, trained only in modalities of power and control, they can only interfere with the music being played.

What should they be able to do? They should stand ready to help the player in trouble to get back into rhthym. Instead, they take over. Instead of supporting the mother, they say, ‘Okay, you have failed. It’s our piece now.’

How do you (doctors) get a 30 percent Cesarean rate? You orchestrate it. You write a piece in which the third movement is a Cesarean, then build the first two with that in mind. You write in a different language; you write in terms of centimeters of dilation, external fetal monitor, internal fetal monitor, pH, scalp electrodes, Cesarean birth experience, arrest of labor, protracted labor, fetal distress, episiotomy, prolapse, cephalopelvic disproportion, ultrasound waves, amniocentesis, “premium baby’, post-mature (when the baby stays too long in the uterus), “maternal environment” (formerly known as mother). Those are the words, the notes, while the piece is played to the rhythm of fear.”