This is the bare minimum.
Birth offers an opportunity for a woman to feel the most confident, powerful, in love, whole, and blissful she ever has in her life.
Birth is not just about "safety" or a "safe delivery". It is about who a woman becomes and uncovers in herself through the beautiful intensity of her birth experience. Two beings are born during a birth—a child and a mother.
Unfortunately, what we are seeing today with the rise of postpartum mental health disorders is a clear link back to the trauma and boundary crossing that women experience in overly medicalized birth settings.
Settings where they have been assaulted, manipulated, coerced, and deeply disrespected in the most vulnerable moment of their lives. Settings where their partner was unprepared to step up and protect them.
They are then told that what was done was in the name of "safety" and really that they and their baby were actually "saved" by the medical industrial complex.
This is not ok. And we as women feel it in our bones when the physiological birth experience has been disrespected through manipulation and coercion.
A space or system that does not honor the sacredness, sensitivity, or spiritual nature of birth does not care to know birth.
Even more importantly, a system that does not prioritize the uninterrupted hormonal and biological relationship between a mother and her baby does not care to know or understand birth.
The desired outcome of birth is a whole, healthy, empowered, transformed woman who has brought her child into the world in her divine, intuitive way.
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