Growing Rose: Modern Babies Made Naturally

“…women’s bodies contain the knowledge and the fortitude to bring children into this world”  Cindy Crawford in foreword of Gurmukh’s book  Bountiful, Beautiful, Blissful If you haven’t yet met Ina May Gaskin, you really must. This woman is one of our nation’s most inspirational and impactful midwives. From her experiences with naturally-birthing mothers on the Farm in Tennessee, traveling the world to host dialogues and give lectures, and her consistent statistical data and advocate work to lower maternal death rates, I believe Ina May has developed an extra-sensory perception to women’s bodies and their birthing capacities. Or perhaps she always possessed this natural propensity and followed her life’s calling with surrender. Either way, she has greatly compelled me in my own journey to recognize my body’s strengths and trust in its natural birthing capacity. While reading her literature (I include a list of those books of hers that I have read a...

As an undergraduate at DePaul University, in let’s say 2009, I had a science requirement to meet and therefore took the much-sough-after Women’s Health course. I somehow had the good karmic luck of having a Certified Midwife as my instructor. When it came to the time to discuss childbirth, this professor did something very smart: she had us watch the documentary, The Business of Being Born (watch this! Lake & Epstein, 2008 ). This documentary exposed a lot of taboo facts about modern childbirth and its switch from natural methods to overmedicalized approaches, approaches that I think most women of my generation may find to be the standard, such as epidurals, elective C-sections, and pitocin-induced contractions. In other words, these are the births that make well-known hospitals brag about the amount of pregnancies they can manage in any given time span. But this documentary also showed that birth belongs to us, and it is something that bodies with uteri have been doing...