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Page 3 of 3 Pathways: Is there such a thing as an ideal birth? Ina May: Yes: in a place where you are most comfortable. If you have a woman who is terrified of being at home, the birth ought to happen in a hospital. There, her needs for privacy and low lighting would be recognized. Her need to be nourished through her labor met. I’d like to see, in my dream world, that everybody would have a midwife, like the law in Germany that says there must be a midwife at every birth. Hopefully, these midwives would get to know you prenatally, so they know you well and you trust each other. Since a midwife has to have a life, too, there would be two women you would work with in case one has a toothache. I think it is good when midwives work in groups, small groups. Someone might also have a longer labor and wear out one midwife and need to have the other one spell her. We help the mother physiologically through the labor. Any fears she has are addressed and eliminated, which is possible for skilled midwives to do. We let the woman’s body do things the way it does best. We don’t have a rigid protocol that governs how long women are permitted to labor. It doesn’t make sense to have this stuff all decided on paper from the beginning because some women dilate quickly and some slowly, so we are mindful of vital signs, not the clock. All women are different, so there are no cookie-cutter, rigid guidelines. Ideally, the woman gives birth under her own power, and is able to move freely in labor and adopt the position that works best for her. And then, we don’t whisk the baby away—we leave the cord intact and place the baby on the mother, who is the ideal warmer, and place them chest to chest, so the baby can drain any fluids with ease. We postpone all this weighing and measuring stuff, as the baby is not going to get taller. We recognize that the time right after birth is very important, not just for the mother and baby to bond, but because this time together is capable of preventing hemorrhages, with the least blood loss. It also helps the placenta to come. The mother and baby are left together, and the partner is able to feel a part of this experience. It is an amazing transformation that can take place in people when they find out the strength of birth and what an amazing source of information and inspiration it can be. It affects your life forevermore. How great it is to pull strength out of birth, rather than be the passive victim in a ritual of separation, which is too often what we see in the hospital—that people actually get driven apart by birth. When you look into the mammal world, birth is all about connection, and without all of that intervention, mothers and babies naturally connect and don’t have to be put back together again. We tell ourselves that we don’t have any instinct to birth, but we do this because we have all of this interference that makes it impossible to know what our inner impulses are when there are so many orders, procedures and things happening to us during the time when we should be allowed to flow with this amazing energy. I keep being amazed by the number of birth books that don’t even mention “energy” and the energy of birth. When I witnessed my first birth, on a school bus, the woman’s level of energy was, well, I’ll use the phrase a Japanese obstetrician uses—“mystic beauty”—when he sees a woman in her full power. That is what I saw in my first birth. We miss that when the woman in labor is not given the amount of respect she needs in order to accomplish this work she is doing.
Pathways: In Birth Matters, you point out that women are more afraid of normal birth than major surgery, hence the climbing C-section rates. You suggest that women and men counter this fear by learning what a normal birth is, by reading birth stories [see page 30 for a birth story] or by attending a normal birth. What other ways can we advocate for the human right of an intervention-free birth?
Ina May: This book, Birth Matters, was written because a twentysomething-year-old woman at a publishing house asked me to help her explain to her family why she wanted to become a midwife. She wanted to show her family why becoming a midwife was a better idea than becoming an obstetrician. So I answered her questions, which were many, and ended up writing a manifesta! She is at midwifery training right now [this interview took place in June 2011]. The book answers all of our questions on why birth in America is the way it is, and how we can move out of the medical model and to a woman/child-centered model. As I end in the book, woman-centered care is a human right, but we don’t have enough midwives to meet demand, especially in the U.S. As the U.N. declaration states, we need more midwives. To find a midwife, visit the Midwives Alliance of North America at mana.org. To learn more about the Midwives Model of Care, turn to page 29 or visit midwivesmodelofcare.org. To listen to the full 90-minute interview with Ina May, visit our website at pathwaystofamilywellness.com. Watch Ina May talk about Birth Matters to Pathways Connect groups on our YouTube channel at youtube.com/user/PathwaysConnect.
 This article appeared in Pathways to Family Wellness magazine, Issue #31.
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