Thought about Giving Birth?

Below is an interesting article on at-Home births. Since I've never been pregnant, I have not had to do any sort of investigation or contemplation about what I would want in my childbirth process.  After reading the below article, I thought it'd be helpful to share it for other women who may not be as informed.   

Mommy Wars: The Prequel
Ina May Gaskin and the Battle for at-Home Births
by Samantha Shapiro, May 23, 2012

One Monday morning last spring, Ina May Gaskin got into her golf cart and drove it down the dirt road away from her home on the Farm, a community of 175 residents on a former commune in rural Tennessee that her husband started in the 1970s. She pulled up to the community center, where she would be teaching a class on delivering breech babies. The class was part of a weeklong seminar Gaskin and her fellow midwives were offering to an eclectic group: nurse-midwifery students attending for college credit; a Boston-area family-practice doctor; midwives from around the country; and one, from Australia, who went by the one-word moniker Macca. They had traveled to this corner of southern Tennessee to learn from the founding mother of the natural-birth movement.

Gaskin began her presentation. She told the students that “at first, we brought breech pregnancies to the hospital, but we found after a while that we could deliver them here just fine. Footling breeches, which are thought to be the most difficult, in our experience, they often just slid right out.” Gaskin, who is 72, has the spry, almost Seussian presence of someone much younger. Her gray hair, trimmed since the days when she wore it in thigh-length braids, was loose and a bit wild, and she wore jeans, gardening shoes and a homemade jacket.

Gaskin, a longtime critic of American maternity care, is perhaps the most prominent figure in the crusade to expand access to, and to legalize, midwife-assisted homebirth. Although she practices without a medical license, she is invited to speak at major teaching hospitals and conferences around the world and has been awarded an honorary doctorate from Thames Valley University in England. She is the only midwife to have an obstetric procedure named for her. The Gaskin Maneuver is used for shoulder dystocia, when a baby’s head is born but her shoulders are stuck in the birth canal.

Gaskin cued up a video of a birth that took place in the 1980s. The couple, Judy and Brad, had traveled to the Farm from another state because their midwife couldn’t deliver their breech baby vaginally.

Most American doctors and midwives won’t. In 2001 the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) recommended C-sections as the best route of delivery for breech babies. Although ACOG modified that view in 2006, more than 90 percent of breech babies are now born by Caesarean, and the Farm is one of a dwindling number of places in the United States where practitioners still know how to perform vaginal breech delivery.

On the video, after five hours of pushing, Judy’s son emerged buttocks first, his tiny scrotum swollen from the pressure. Judy made increasingly urgent sounds — something between a Tuvian throat singer and a squawking chicken — as the buttocks inched out.

Gaskin paused the video. “The main danger with breech babies is that the head, the largest part of baby, is last to come out, so it may get stuck,” she told the students. “If the baby has been delivered to the umbilicus, you have five or six minutes before hypoxia sets in, but you don’t want to pull on the head if you can’t see the neck for fear of injuring the baby,” Gaskin said.

She restarted the video to show how that situation could unfold. Judy’s baby had been born up to his chest but his arms were caught alongside his head inside his mother’s body. On the DVD, a younger Gaskin, wearing a sleeveless dress, moved without a hint of nervousness. She rotated the baby’s torso vigorously to loosen it from Judy’s body; one arm emerged, but Gaskin was unable to reach in and grab a shoulder. The Tuvian throat sounds escalated.

Gaskin let the baby, half-born, hang out of his mother and dangle off the side of the bed. Using the weight of his body to traction his head into a better position, she pulled him out with a rush of bloody fluid. The boy looked a little limp, but after a vigorous rubdown and some gulps from an oxygen tank, he gave a cry. Minutes later Judy called out joyfully to another Farm midwife “Pamela, we have a baby!”

I first learned about Gaskin when I became pregnant last year. In my Brooklyn neighborhood, her books on birth are a standard part of the pregnancy canon, and I was given “Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth” and two copies of “Spiritual Midwifery” by three different friends. Now in its fourth edition, “Spiritual Midwifery” is a heady dispatch from the Farm’s midwifery practice around 1975. It tells of how Gaskin and other women discovered that birth could be a euphoric experience, a way of accessing a uniquely female power. In first-person anecdotes of births — “I began to rush and everything got psychedelic” is a typical description — the book shows vaginal, unmedicated birth to be an unparalleled opportunity for transcendence and communion. It has been translated into six languages and sold well over half a million copies.

Click here to read the remainder of the article.