What Could Hamper Physiological Birth?
If you’re interested in learning more about the background of what physiological birth is, please check out part 1 of this series on physiological birth!
Now that we’ve talked a bit about the hormonal underpinnings of physiological birth, I think it’s also important to speak a bit to the pieces of modern birth that could potentially hamper the physiological process of birth. What could throw a wrench in the hormonal symphony?
I like to separate these into two categories: things within ourselves vs things external to us.
Things Within Ourselves That May Hamper Physiological Birth
This is a huge topic!! We have so many layers as human beings, and have been “programmed” in a way, throughout our entire lives, to have certain beliefs about everything, including birth! And our ability to birth and the ease with which it can happen.
I’m sure you’ve seen at least one depiction of birth in television or movies in your lifetime.. A mother sweating, laying on her back or kind of sitting half propped up in a hospital bed, in a hospital gown, gripping the bed rail, screaming… This is the depiction of birth within our culture (but just to let you know, this has only been the way birth has looked in the last 70 years or so! Before that, women gave birth in hospitals while knocked out in “twilight sleep” and their babies were often pulled from their bodies for them… And before that, women gave birth at home! But I digress, the history of the medicalization of birth is perhaps a topic for another day perhaps :)).
So back to the topic at hand.. I’m sure you can see that the depiction of a woman in a hospital bed screaming her head off sweating while giving birth could imprint a program of fear within women who choose to give birth. Maybe they’d think it is painful, or maybe they’d worry they wouldn’t be able to do it, or that it would just be much easier if they used an epidural so they could remain a “well-behaved and quiet woman” as they birthed?
Not to mention the beliefs that our partners hold about birth based on their programming in their lifetimes!
And to take it one step further, we can think about the held beliefs that our care providers (doctors, midwives, nurses, etc) have about birth, based on their programming in their lifetimes!
There is a whole rabbit hole we could all go down together, diving deep into the cultural programming surrounding birth and how that imprints on us as individuals and a collective society.
But maybe, if you’re interested and open to it, you can instead do some examining of yourself and your ideas about birth and see if you can find out where they come from, and if they are yours to carry forward. :)
What besides cultural programming could hamper the process of physiological birth?
The field of epigenetics tells us that experiences are passed down on a cellular level. So one of the main message that we hear in relation to this is that for survivors of famine -- for example during the world wars when countries were blockaded and no food was allowed in -- have children and grandchildren whose bodies also react to food as if there is a scarcity of it. They have physical (at least.. Not to mention emotional and spiritual) health problems for generations that stem from that initial generation not having enough food for a prolonged period of time. Even if the future generations have plenty of access to food.
How does this relate to birth??
Well, if you can imagine the hormonal process that a woman experiences when she gives birth in a “modern” way.. Whether that is laying screaming and in fear on a hospital bed, or knocked out with twilight sleep and her baby pulled from her body without her participation, or giving birth with an epidural and not feeling physically the sensations of birth in the body as well as not experiencing the hormonal symphony that we talked about in my last post. AND the babies also are imprinted with their own unique physiological stamp from their birth experiences, hormonal and physical and otherwise.
So this memory gets passed down on a cellular level. Even if we’re not cognizant of the details surrounding our birth (or our mother’s or her mother’s) in a conscious way, the body remembers, the cells remember.
This can affect us on so many levels during our own birth experience. Perhaps our physical body doesn’t have easy access to the cellular “instructions” for how to give birth physiologically because our ancestors for the last 2, 3, or 4 generations have not done so… or perhaps we experience stored emotions, fears, and traumas that we haven’t ever been aware of before, while we are trying to relax and open and release to give birth. I’m sure you can imagine a whole list of other ways this could affect us during our pregnancies and/or birthing times as well.
The rules, regulations, and policies that govern birth in different settings.
So, I’m sure you may know this already, but the rules that govern your care provider and the facility in which you give birth can affect the physiological process of birth as well.
If you give birth at home, the care providers who attend your birth are most likely required to carry out certain procedures according to the rules and regs that govern home birth care providers in your state. Certified nurse midwives have different responsibilities to the state than certified professional midwives. Traditional midwives or direct entry midwives may not be licensed or certified by anyone at all, and in that case they would decide their own boundaries and protocols based on how they want to serve women, instead of answering to the state.
If you give birth in the hospital, the hospital administration dictates what has to take place during a birth, in addition to insurance companies having their own set of requirements for care providers there to follow.
Birth centers are usually a bit more strict on policies than either home birth midwives OR hospitals.
So, imagine you’re at home in the beginning of your birthing time, and you decide it’s time to go to the hospital. A nurse has to check your dilation when you get there, and if you’re far enough along to be admitted to the hospital, many will require you to get a saline lock or “hep lock” in your vein (this is a needle in your vein that they use to insert a catheter that they lock and then tape to your hand so they have a “port” to put medication or fluids into if they need to), they will give you a hospital gown to put on, and then have you go into a room with a bed and a chair and a bathroom, a tv perhaps mounted on the wall, a clock, and a lot of machinery. They may also tell you that they need to monitor your contractions and your baby’s heart rate by putting a belt around your belly with two monitors on it that are hooked up via cables to a machine with a screen and a printout of the contractions and heartbeat that are recorded.
I’m explaining all of this because it affects our hormonal flow during birth. Activating our forebrain, people asking you questions, bright lights, machines beeping, someone’s hand reaching into your body to check your cervix (think of the energy of a baby coming down and out, and then contrast that with the energy of someone else’s hand going up and in)... all of these things have a high potential to activate our stress hormones in our body, whether we are cognizant of being stressed our not.
If you remember from my last post on the hormones of birth, stress hormones work against birth flow hormones. All of these actions taken by hospital staff are “required” by their institution or their mandates, for the safety of their patients, but they completely disregard the fact that all of these mandates interrupt the hormonal flow, which could potentially be not safe for the mother or baby in the long term. (The dismal maternal mortality/morbidity rate in our country -- in spite of all of our high tech medical care -- show that all of these protocols and policies are not actually improving outcomes or making things safer, but probably the opposite actually.)
It’s the same with regulations for home birth or birth center births… Midwives have requirements of measuring fetal heart tones every 5-15 minutes, performing vaginal exams, or even the fact that many midwives aren’t able to attend home births for women after 42 weeks gestation could start the process of fear or stress in a woman to the point that birth doesn’t flow as it would if the woman didn’t have to deal with these rules, regulations, and policies and actually decided what her care looked and felt like for her own greater good.
So what is the point of all of this, and what can we do to help protect the flow of physiological birth?
My point is that with the knowledge of the hormones and physiology of normal birth AND the knowledge of what can affect that flow, you can make decisions for yourself during your pregnancy and birth that will uphold your vision and help set the stage for yourself to have the birth that you envision that is best for you and your family.
I really try to hold the space for the women that I work with to take steps to help themselves have a birth experience that feels aligned for them. This includes processing their own birth experience, examining their held beliefs and cultural programming about birth and what it looks and feels like, AND thinking about what they actually do and don’t want in terms of monitoring, testing, and protocols that affect their pregnancies, births, and postpartums.
In fact, if you’re interested in diving deeeeep into this conversation and you live local to Sedona, Arizona, I teach a two-day childbirth education class that covers all of this and much more, so you can help figure out what your own priorities and desires are before your birth.
Otherwise, it’s important to go over all of this with your care provider and your partner if you’re pregnant. What are their policies? What are their held beliefs? Do they believe birth works if it’s allowed to, or do they believe that women need to be saved from birth? Do they expect the worst? Do they value what you want as a birthing woman more than what their institution or insurance or licensing body dictates is best?
And then turn your gaze inward. Examine your own held beliefs, your desires, your programs, your own birth experience when you were born, your mother’s, her mother’s, etc.. Find where you stand so you know how to get where you want to go!
So, I’d love to hear from you if any of this sticks out to you as important or valuable! Or if you have feedback or suggestions about things or ideas I’ve missed or got completely off the mark!
And check out these two videos. One of them shows a typical birth in a birth center and the other shows a mother-led birth at home with a midwife. And remember, these are just the videos! The whole process of labor that is not shown in these videos can be affected by all of the things I wrote about above, including the hormonal process of the baby’s and mama’s transition after the birth as well.
Let me know if you have thoughts or questions! And sign up for my email list below to get more stuff like this sent directly to your inbox (plus some cool free goodies when you sign up) :)
