During the twentieth century, it had been commonplace to raise the main questions regarding childbirth in a negative way. How to give birth without pain? How to give birth without fear? How to be born without violence? As long as the questions are raised in this way, they will usually lead to sophisticated and sterile solutions.
Now the time has come to formulate questions in a positive way. The primary and paradoxically unusual question should be: What are the basic needs of women in labour? This leads one, via the physiological perspective, to take into account that labouring women must maintain a level of adrenaline as low as possible in order to give birth easily. One can conclude that one of the basic needs of labouring women is to feel secure.
Starting from the need to feel secure, one cannot help recalling the most common strategy women have used through the ages in order to meet their basic needs when giving birth. They have always had a tendency to give birth close to their mother, or close to somebody who could play the role of the mother—usually an experienced mother or grandmother in the community. This is the root of midwifery. A midwife is originally a mother figure. In an ideal world, mother is the prototype of the person with whom one feels secure, without feeling observed or judged. The need for midwives is better understood than 30 years ago, but the reason for midwifery needs to be rediscovered.
It is significant that, in his famous book Childbirth Without Fear, Grantly Dick-Read never made a distinction between a birth attended by a doctor and a birth attended by a midwife.
— Michel Odent
Excerpted from "Fear of Death during Labour," Midwifery Today, Issue 67
View table of contents / Order the back issue
Mandy-Saint Louis Doula
~ Birth Doula ~ Saint Louis, Missouri
