Natural Childbirth with Laura Shanley

Welcome to Mama Goddess. I'm your host, Alexandra J. Johnson. This podcast is all about rocking your goddess life, creating vibrant health and celebrating motherhood and family life. It's about living an authentically awesome life. Let's have some fun. Hello and welcome. I'm Alexandra J. Johnson, and today's guest is Laura Shanley. Laura is an author, freelance writer, speaker, and childbirth consultant. She is one of the leading voices in the natural birth movement.

Welcome, Laura. Thank you so much for joining us.

Sure. I'm happy to be here. Yes.

Well, you. You're a wealth of knowledge and I deeply appreciate it. I read your book in, like, two days, and you have a book, Unassisted Childbirth. Can you tell us about your. And what is unassisted childbirth? It was totally foreign to me when I started reading it.

Well, I'm actually not that crazy about the term. To me, it's just childbirth. But because childbirth has become so assisted in this culture, then to just give birth the way I believe nature intended, I kind of have to find it as unassisted or unattended. Hopefully, someday I won't and it'll just be giving birth. But what I mean by unassisted childbirth is giving birth without a doctor, midwife, or nurse. So no professional attendance.

And then you've given. Oh, sorry, go ahead.

No, go ahead. I was just going to say you've given.

You've had four children.

Right.

Where you had. It was all by yourself at your home, right?

Well, I had. My husband caught my first one and I caught the other three. I also had a baby that I lost from a congenital heart defect, so technically five, but I have four, 11 living children. Wow.

And then what inspired you to say, I'm going to do this on my own? Like what? Yeah, I'm very curious about that.

Okay. Well, I had met my husband, who now my former husband, but I met him when I was 18 and a college student, and he had become fascinated by the evolution of self consciousness and had been looking into birth trauma and how if you have a traumatic birth, that that can sort of set the course for your whole life and you sort of approach the world with fear. And so when you come into this world with trauma, many problems can ensue, both physical and psychological. And he was really intrigued by this. And so he had come across a book called Childbirth Without Fear by Grantley Dickrid, who was an English physician, basically was writing in the 19, 30s, 40s, 50s. And the basic concept behind childbirth without fear is that childbirth should ideally give a woman a feeling of exaltation supposed to be this horrendous, painful, dangerous ordeal. And really why should the very thing that ensures the continuation of the race be fraught with peril? It just didn't make sense to Dick Read. So what he found is that most of the problems in birth come because women are afraid and they're triggering the fight flight response. They're basically telling their body there's a danger out there that they either need to fight or run away from. And so all sorts of things start happening to the body in response to this fear. The body starts producing adrenaline and stops producing oxytocin, the very hormone you need to give birth. Estrogen production plummets and your body is basically prepared now to run or fight this run from or fight this danger that you're telling it is out there. And so it's using all of your resources to either run or fight. All non essential functions basically shut down. So you stop digesting your food and you stop giving birth. Basically blood and oxygen stop going into the uterus and they go into the arms and legs so you can fight this danger. So he says that the uterus of a frightened woman in labor is literally white. It doesn't have the fuel it needs. And so consequently childbirth becomes painful and problematic. And so I just found this fascinating. I was not interested in childbirth at the time at all. I never really thought much about having babies. I just didn't really think of myself as a very maternal person. But I was so intrigued by this and it just made so much sense to me. And so I read the book and I remember as I'm reading it, maternal feelings started to surface in me for the first time. It's like as the fear sort of went away, then the maternal feelings that had sort of been underneath it came to the surface. And around that same time I also was reading books about the power of thoughts and feelings. I had gotten very interested in the Seth material by Jane Roberts. And so when my husband and I ended up getting together, he had actually given me childbirth without fear the night that we met, because he was reading it for the second time and just was so fascinated. So that kind of started us out. And then eventually a year, year and a half later when we decided to have children, we thought, well, if we bring somebody into this, like if we bring a midwife in or we bring a doctor in to our birth, we're going to basically have to teach them everything that we're learning about the power of thoughts and feelings and about the effect of fear on the body. And so we thought, well, let's just do it ourselves. And we were very much into belief suggestions or affirmations and had been having success with those, with, with belief suggestions in other areas of our lives. So we just decided, okay, we'll just give birth without a doctor. A midwife. Wow. Started it.

That's amazing. So you found out you were pregnant and you essentially just went the whole process by yourself and with your husband and you didn't have a midwife, a doula, nobody checking in, you had no idea what was going on inside?

No, but I just, I don't. You know, I grew up in a very medical family. My father was a physician, my mother did medical research. My sister was a labor and delivery nurse. And I already was. You know, I never. Doctors for me were not a source of comfort. Not that I, you know, I do feel like doctors do some good and I'm not anti doctor in general, but I, to me, they're a last resort. I'm definitely a believer in emergency medicine, but, but I really look at the mind as the source that all disease begins in the mind. I never looked to doctors as, oh, I'm going to go and they're going to make me well. First of all, I'd always been healthy and I was always really terrified of doctors. I had had some bad experiences with a pediatrician and, and I just, they were not a source of comfort for me. So the idea of not going to a doctor appealed to me and I really was just so taken with the Seth material and the idea of, you know, that we create our own reality. And I just so fascinated by that concept that I felt confident that, no, I, you know, I trust myself, I trust my body. There's, there's some consciousness that knew how to grow me from an egg and a sperm into an adult. And I'm so blown away by that. That is an incredible thing. And why wouldn't that consciousness know how to birth a baby? Why would it know how to grow the baby inside a woman but not know how to get the baby out? And so most of what we did, you know, so I had read Childbirth Without Fear. I also read Ina Mae Gaskin's spiritual Midwifery, which I found I just loved the birth stories in there. And they had the birth stories, even though Ina May, she isn't a supporter of unassisted childbirth. And now when I look at those birth stories, now there's too much intervention in those birth stories for me, although I think they're still wonderful, but still too much of the midwife saying, why don't you do this or that or get in a certain position, or let me check you now, or measure dilation or whatever. Because now I've learned more about how outside intervention also can affect the process. But at the time, I really didn't focus on the parts of the book that dealt with complications or even what a complication is. I just read the birth stories over and over, and I remember one in particular where a woman was talking about, or maybe the midwife was talking about, how this woman had. With her first birth, she had felt like she was in an altered state of consciousness, and then she felt contractions. And then the baby was born. And with her second birth, she didn't feel contractions. All she felt was this incredible altered state of consciousness. And the baby just came out really quickly. And I thought, maybe that's what birth can be, if we can really sort of get into that zone. Now, I've been reading the Abraham Hicks material, and they talk about the vortex and getting into the vortex and sort of, you know, getting into that zone where everything just flows. And so I think, you know, that's what those books sort of helped me to understand, that there is this zone that you can get into where you really don't have to know, you know, physiologically everything that's happening in your body any more than, say, when you have sex. Do you have to know how your body is going to have an orgasm or getting pregnant? Do you have to know how the body gets pregnant in order to get pregnant? No. So I saw that birth really isn't a function of the conscious mind. And when we do sort of try to get in there and figure it all out and think, we have to know step by step what's happening. And we divide it into phases. Stage one, or people talk about their pregnancies and they're like, I'm in my first trimester. I'm in my second trimester. These arbitrary divisions. And I feel, and I felt at the time, just intuitively, no, it's all one process. And you don't have to put all these numbers on it and divisions. And it's more just. It's like any sort of creative act, like painting a picture or dancing or here again, making love, where you sort of get into that place of feeling good and trusting your body and relaxing, and then you let it unfold just like a flower blossoming. So those are the kinds of images I always kept in my mind. And so I felt really confident. I didn't feel. I never felt during My pregnancies, like, oh, I'm scared. And I wish I could go to someone who could tell me what's going on. I just felt like, no, the baby's growing. I'm also very interested in dreams. And I've looked to my dreams a lot for guidance. And I remember once during my first pregnancy, I had a dream one night that I saw the baby inside me in the. Well, what people assume is the correct position. I tend to have a broader idea of what the correct position is. But I saw the baby head down inside me, and it was a reassuring dream. And then the next day, I got a letter from my sister, who was the labor and delivery nurse, and. And she said it was a panicky letter. How do you know what position the baby is in? And I felt like, well, if you kind of tune in, I don't even know that it was that important for me to know the position. But I suppose a part of me had wondered. And so I saw in the dream that the baby was in the correct position. And so those are the kinds of things I feel like I was beginning to have so much faith in, in myself and in myself. I'm not just talking my ego. I think the ego is great. But we're more than just the ego. So I was starting to become aware of these other aspects of my consciousness. And I did begin to feel that inner guidance. And there was nothing in me that was saying, go to some professional and have them tell you whether you're doing okay, whether the baby's doing okay. I definitely did not like the idea of anyone telling me what to eat. I was always somewhat anti authority, but I felt like I'm going to eat whatever I feel like eating. In my book, I don't say, okay, here is the optimal diet for a pregnant woman. To me, it's, listen to your body, eat what you want to eat. Don't make such a big deal out of it. I think the body can digest. We're designed to deal with food shortages, and we don't always have an optimal diet. We're not always. Throughout history, we haven't had access to wonderful food all the time. So I think the body is very adaptable. To me, it all gets back to the mind. And if you can have a positive mindset, then the body can do pretty well, even if you're not in an optimal environment or optimal food. But I ate well. I got fresh air, I got exercise. I just took good care of myself and never felt the need to go to anybody outside of myself to Tell me what to do. Yeah.

And I love in your book, you also say, which I think you're talking about, with the mind that you focused on all that could go right instead of all the things that could go wrong. And in our culture, it's very much, you know, I mean, we tend to worry and there's fear based. Is everything okay? And then we easily run through all the things that could possibly go wrong in our life, in our birth, in pregnancy, rather than focusing on what we want. So can you talk about that and how we actually make that shift?

Well, I know in both the Abraham Hicks material and the Seth material, they talk about, you get what you concentrate on and that there really is power in our imagination, in our thoughts. And they do thoughts draw, like thoughts to them. They draw events to them. So to me, this just all made so much sense. It just felt right. So it wasn't. Even though I had grown up with a lot of fear, my mother is always amazed that I gave birth the way I did because I was such a frightened child. But this just made sense to me, specifically in birth. If you really think about it and you think about how. How birth is presented in our culture, okay, this is where we're basically a mass of chemicals that accidentally came together and there is no God or larger consciousness or if there is a God, some people will say, well, then God gave us doctors. But to me, it doesn't make sense to think, okay, we're a mass of chemicals that accidentally came together. And then it makes more sense to think, no, there's a loving, intelligent consciousness. There's a mind behind all this. And it makes sense to think that if we're going to continue the race, we have to in childbirth. It doesn't make sense that it would be poorly designed. It makes more sense to me because when I first approached all this, I was more a rational, critical thinker, and I wasn't that intuitive, really. So I didn't really come into all this through the spiritual side. I came into this because this made sense to my rational, critical mind. It made sense the way Grant Lee Dickory explained it, that birth has been beautifully designed. And so it's just a matter of basically getting out of the way and allowing it to happen. So when you ask me, how do we make that shift, are you talking about in general, the focus on the positive or specifically in childbirth? Either one.

Whatever inspires you to talk about.

We could benefit from all. You know, for me, it was when I was reading the Seth material that all just. It just. It Felt right to me. So what I started doing is I started saying belief suggestions. And even though I didn't even in a way believe them at first, I said them anyway and they did help me to turn myself around. And so I just started saying well we had been reading about fear, shame and guilt by another man, Gerald Heard, who had sort of gotten David, my ex, on this path in the first place, who wrote about the evolution of self consciousness and he talks about as our consciousness initially we are more like the animals. We are sort of more in tune with nature or with the larger consciousness with other animals. But then we are meant to develop a self conscious reasoning personality. And so we have to sort of temporarily separate from, from the larger consciousness in order to establish a self consciousness. Now we're getting to the point in our evolution where we've really developed a pretty strong sense of self. Now we can once again become aware of our connection to all that is become aware that we do have this inner guidance. We don't have to be afraid that we're going to lose our sense of self. We can have both the sense of self and the sense of being a part of something larger. And that we do have this kind of. So I basically just said to myself that oh, and so Gerald Heard says in the process of becoming self conscious we've developed beliefs in fear and shame and guilt and we think that somehow we're bad for like in the Bible, eating from the tree of knowledge, that somehow this is bad to become self conscious, self aware. And so we tend to be critical of ourselves. So I speak started saying belief suggestions that I believe I'm not afraid, I believe I'm not ashamed, I believe I'm not guilty. And I know some people say oh well then you're focusing on what you're not instead of what you are. But it worked for me. But I just told myself I also really am a big believer in forgiveness and I've seen what lack of forgiveness can do to people. Not just I've seen it specifically in childbirth, but I've also seen it in other areas of people's lives and when they carry around anger towards themselves or towards others, no matter what has been done to them, I think that can be a major block and it can make it more difficult. So I definitely focused on that, that I forgave myself, that I forgave anybody and everybody that had ever hurt me. I told myself I loved myself, I believed in myself, I believed that I had help, inner help. I trusted myself, I did a little bit of Visualizing with how the birth was going to be, I worked on my dreams. I practiced giving birth in dreams. I would tell myself before I went to sleep that I was going to practice giving birth. So in the beginning of my pregnancy, I dreamt that I was in a hospital surrounded by my father and other medical people, and I was having a hard time. By the end of my pregnancy, I was dreaming that I was giving birth at home. Everything was going smoothly. The one thing that I did not do is, and I've seen people do this quite a bit. I didn't try too hard. And I think I've seen people say this about, say with people, which. Prayer, to me is sort of another form of belief, suggestion, or affirmation. But I've heard people say, I prayed so hard that I would have a good birth. And to me, if you really look at that, or I got everybody to pray for me. We had a prayer chain and we called and everybody was praying for me. Well, what are you really saying when you're saying you prayed really hard? What you're saying is that you think that childbirth, left to its own devices, won't go right, but if you pray really hard, that maybe it will. And, you know, do you pray for the sun to come up tomorrow? You know, ancient people did because they didn't have that basic trust. So I've seen people go overboard and feel like they need to pray really hard and they need to do all these, you know, a million different things in order for the birth to go well. And so if you look behind that, you see that behind that is really a belief that it won't go well if you just do nothing. And so I'm kind of an advocate sort of doing nothing, learning what it means to do nothing, that it is really more a matter of getting out of your own way. And so I didn't try. I didn't do a lot of visualization. I didn't say a lot of affirmations. I just sort of. It just felt right to me that, yeah, it's going to go well. It's just going to go well because I'm not going to get in my own way. And that's pretty much the approach that I try to take with life. And I've had varying degrees of success, success in some areas in my life and other areas I've struggled with. But I think it's not getting in your own way, trusting that it says in the Abraham Hicks material that there isn't a stream of goodness and a stream of badness. There's basically a stream of goodness that you either allow or you don't allow. I'm not a believer in dualism, that if you have the good, you have to have the bad. That Yin yang, you gotta balance it out. There has to be pain if you want to have pleasure. I think that if we can understand how the power of our thoughts and feelings and how we create our own reality, then I think life can be pretty good. Not that you won't have your challenges, but I don't think we have to have horrendous events happen to us because that's the only way we can learn. I think as we learn, then we will have fewer and fewer unpleasant things in our lives and we can have pleasurable lives and pleasurable births. So that was the process I took, is just, you know, affirmations, visualization. And I tell people, if prayer works for you, then prayer, you know, whatever. And really just sort of having. I don't think you can just focus on pregnancy in and of itself. You know, when a woman is pregnant, you can't just say, well, the rest of my life is really a mess and I'm totally stressed out, but I am going to have a beautiful birth. There is a writer, Gail Peterson, and she says, as a woman lives, so shall she give birth. So you really have to kind of pull back and really be willing to change your life, to change your attitude towards life and towards yourself and be forgiving towards yourself and just be gentle with yourself and be willing to take those baby steps in turning yourself around and just try to have a positive attitude during the day. If unpleasant thoughts or feelings come up, pay attention to them. Don't be afraid of them. Be willing to be analytical. And if something doesn't feel right to you, expect, explore it. For me, I also found journaling to be helpful. And so I wrote about, you know, I wrote about my. My feelings and thoughts during my pregnancies, so. So that helped. And then, you know, basically just let everything unfold.

Yeah, it's so beautiful. It just as you're sharing it. And I know women listening, men listening, are just going to have a feeling of relaxation. You know, it's just like, let go, relax, like our bodies know what they're doing. And as you were just saying with childbirth, without fear, that when we have fear, our uterus turns white and it's like we stop the flow, so we need let go.

And what I've done to is in those days, in the early days, most of my focus was on how we get in Our own way, inner intervention, basically how we're stopping birth from happening primarily because of fear. But I think shame and guilt also get in the way. If you think your body is shameful, if you think sex is shameful, then that can affect birth. So I definitely said police suggestions about not being ashamed of my body and my sexuality, that I was accepting, accepting of my sexuality. If you have a hard time spreading your legs to have sex, chances are you're going to have a hard time spreading your legs to give birth. So I definitely worked on being very comfortable with my body and accepting of my sexuality now, since that time. And I was pretty naive really until I started writing the book in the early 90s, 1990s, I did not realize what was going on in hospitals. I didn't realize how much doctors were interfering with birth. Just every step of the way, some of it, I started to become aware of it as I was writing my book. So there's definitely a lot in there where there's a chapter or two about the dangers of medical intervention. But even. Well, I remember I had sent the book to the, it had gone off to the printers and. And I came across more things. I was like, I almost felt like, wait, I got to put this in there. But I thought, no, overall I didn't want to focus on, you can't frighten women into having a better birth. I don't think you can tell them like, okay, the hospital is so horrendous. There's all these things going on that in and of itself is not going to convince women to trust themselves and to stay out of the hospital. But, but it is something that now I have found out more about and I basically feel that the problems in birth can be reduced to three main causes. Poverty, certainly women in third world countries. When you're starving to death, all aspects of your life are going to be difficult. So poverty, inside intervention, fear, shame and guilt, and outside intervention. And basically the way that doctors, most doctors approach poverty, birth is it's an accident waiting to happen. They believe that women's bodies are poorly designed and that birth is the most dangerous thing that a woman will ever go through. People look throughout history and they'll say, well, women and babies were dying, routinely dying in birth prior to the advent of the modern day hospital. And I've done research about this and no, they weren't in healthy tribal cultures, they weren't dying. Anthropologists have said that they could observe a healthy tribe for years and never see a death or a complication in birth. But if you had, say in the cities where you had women who were overworked and underfed, really dirty living conditions, or you had tribal cultures that were very controlled, where the women were not treated well, where the babies were taken away from the mothers right after birth, then childbirth didn't always go well, so you have to really dig a little bit deeper. But I think so much of what doctors do is based on a belief that childbirth is inherently dangerous. And we know this because of these high infant and maternal mortality rates throughout history. First of all, people weren't keeping records, so a lot of it is just speculation. So many women were dying. So basically, what happens when women go into the hospital now is that there are so many rules and regulations, and it's very hard. I'm not a home birth snob. I'm not saying you have to give birth at home, but it's definitely a challenge to go into the hospital and say, you know, I trust my body. I just like everybody to leave me alone, and if I need you, I'll call you. You know, just like. And because they say no, when you're in our playground, you play by our rules. You know, they have their rules and regulations. And so you go in. First of all, they may not even. They may induce a woman because they've determined that, you know, pregnancy should be this long, 40 weeks and no more. And babies are taken before that, you know, any. Routinely, I think taken before that anyhow. But. And then they say, okay, first stage of labor dilation should last this long. And then once your water breaks, then you have, like, in Colorado, you have 12 hours. You don't give birth within 12 hours of your water breaking. It's either pitocin, which is artificial oxytocin, which makes the contractions very painful. They'll either give you pitocin to try to speed up labor, or they give you a C section. And so each stage, you're not really given the freedom a lot of the time to move around. They may put you on a monitor. I just believe from the research I've done, I just think these interventions are horrible. I think they're dangerous. I think we will eventually look back at this as a barbaric time in American obstetrics. I just think the more I read about it, and when I started writing about birth, the C section rate was probably below 25%. Now it's even below 20%. Now it's about one in three. You have a chance, 33% chance of having a C section. And this is major surgery. And then you're recovering from. Yeah, you're recovering from surgery. You have to take morphine, you have to take drugs for pain. And where do you think that's going? And you want to nurse your baby. I mean, we're having babies drugged. So I do think it's really a challenge if you want to take this information and say, okay, but I'm going to do it in the hospital. It can be done. And especially it can be done if you have a positive attitude, but you better be prepared that you will not be met with open arms. And, yes. What is your birth plan? They're afraid of lawsuits. The average OB GYN is sued 2 1/2 times in his lifetime. And there's no guarantee every 15 to 20 minutes a baby is stillborn in an American hospital. People assume that you go to the hospital and, well, you're pretty much guaranteed that baby's going to live, everything's going to be fine. And it's just not true. So I don't know what led me to talk about all that. You asked me some question, veered off. That's awesome.

There's so much.

So, I mean, yeah.

You touched on so many topics that we could dive into. I'm curious about, you know, because I'm sure you get the pushback and there's the question of what about complications? Like, what if the baby is breech? And emergency surgeries. Can you just talk a little bit about complications?

I kind of think for some reason I've had. My experiences in birth have been all over the place. And sometimes I think, well, maybe just so I can say, been there, done that, My first baby was actually a face presentation. Face presentation is not the easiest way for a baby to come out.

Wait, tell me what a face presentation is. I don't know what that is.

Well, he was coming out face first. So when I reached down and I felt. Instead of feeling a head, I felt a face, which meant that his neck, his head was leaned back and his face was coming out first. It's not the easiest. You know, I'd say it's definitely easier if they have their head, their chin tucked down, and their head is coming out first. And so some people do look at that as a complication, and they would say, oh, he's a face presentation. Let's do an emergency C section. But I basically just relaxed and he came flying out into my husband's hands, which Michel Odaunt, who was a French obstetrician, who actually wrote the foreword to the new edition of my book, the second edition of my book, the second, coming out February 28th. And so he wrote a short foreword to it. But he's very supportive of home birth and of unassisted birth. And he says there is such a thing as a fetus ejection reflex that just like there's a sperm ejection reflex that propels the sperm out of a man's body, there's a fetus ejection reflex that will propel the baby out with, like, almost no effort on the woman's part at all. We don't have to. People think of pushing, panting, struggling. No, it's more just not inhibiting the fetus ejection reflex. I had a very strong fetus ejection reflex with my first baby. He came flying out. My husband caught him in midair, and I felt him coming. I was sitting on the toilet. And we were. We had some people at our birth. We had my ex boyfriend and his new boyfriend and another friend of ours and a filmmaker and my husband. So I think that's what five men and me, which someone once told me, they're like, God, that's really. That's really perverted. You gave birth with five men. It's like, well, that's. We kind of said at the time, like, you know, does anybody want to come to the birth? And that's who wanted to come. You know, they were just. And so. And, you know, these men were, like, very intuitive and just, you know, they were interested and so not in any sort of perverse way. And so we were. I was sitting on the toilet, and so these guys were sitting in the bathroom with me. And then I reached down and I felt the baby's face at my perineum. And so I stood up and I walked over to the bed, and I got on the bed and I was on my hands and knees. And I just heard, because I thought, well, I was going to turn over and give birth on my back. I thought that's how babies were born. And then I heard this voice, sort of an inner voice, say, don't turn over. And I didn't. And the baby just came flying out, and David caught him in midair. So, you know, so when you ask about complications, you know, to some people, that would have been a complication. Now, with my next baby, I had decided that I was going to give birth on my hands and knees, because that had worked so well the first time. But then I had a dream that was so vivid to me. And in the dream, there was a woman. I was watching a woman. She was Standing up over this little plastic baby bath. And she was catching her baby herself. And I heard a voice in the dream say, tell her to remember not to do too much. And I felt like. And I remember saying, oh, I understand, but it isn't a matter of pushing and panting and figuring out what this complication is and how to deal with that and reading all the books and remember not to do too much. So I decided that, okay, I'm going to give birth standing. And I don't necessarily follow every dream. I think some dreams can reveal fears to you. I'm not necessarily saying if you have a dream, do it, but I think we definitely should pay attention to it. And you can kind of learn what dreams are sort of revealing your fears and what dreams are actually giving you guidance and are you tapping into a possible future event. And. But this dream felt very real to me. So when I went into labor with him, and actually with him, we had had sex in labor, which I've since read is a good thing to do. It relaxes you. The vagina naturally widens when you have sex, of course, then there's lubricant in there. And so we had sex. And then I got up and I was walking across the room and my water broke. And then I reached down and I felt a foot. So I had not been expecting a breech birth. A friend of mine, I think, who was actually at my first birth, one of the men that was at my first birth told me he had a dream that he saw the baby inside me standing up. But I still was not really expecting a breech birth. But so here's this little foot. And once my water broke, I really, with that second birth, I'd had some pain with my first birth, not unbearable, but I did feel some pain with this one. After my water broke, I didn't feel anything. The only way that I even knew I was having concussions was because I put my hand inside myself and I could feel the muscles contracting, but I really wasn't in pain. So I'm just kind of standing there and there's this foot that's hanging out of me and he's just like, the baby's just pointing his toes and you know, her toes. You know, there was one foot at that time and he's like wiggling the foot around and. And so, you know, my two year old son was like, what's that? That's the baby spot. And you know, there was no pressure from the head because there was no head. And so. And my husband kind of Looked at me and he's like, what do we do? Do you want to call an ambulance? And I said, no, you know, I'm. And I was a little nervous at that point, but I just said, now, let's just say our belief suggestions. So we said belief suggestions that we had inner help and, you know, that I trusted my body. And. And little by little, his foot just got lower. I mean, it was all a very fast process, really. But then. And then his other foot just popped out. And I didn't push or anything. I just kind of waited. And because I wasn't in pain then that wasn't an issue. And then something just said the time was right. And I gave one push pull and just like guided him out by the feet. So now if you go. First of all, if you go into a hospital, they will, you know, they'll know generally that the baby is breech, and they'll just go ahead and do a C section. There's also a. In the town I used to live in in Boulder, there's a man in a wheelchair who was coming out feet first, and the doctor pushed him back in by his feet and, you know, like, broke his neck or whatever. And he's been in a wheelchair. They don't look at that as something, you know, they do not want you giving birth feet first. So. But he came out just fine. Now, my next birth, she was posterior. My baby was posterior. This is another thing that they may do a C section for. Instead of facing my back, which technically they say babies are supposed to be facing your back, she was facing my front, and I gave birth to her. I was by myself and my husband was at the library and my other two kids were sleeping. And so I gave birth to her on one, sort of straddling that little bathtub again. But I was down on one foot and one knee straddling it. And that was the position that felt right to me that time. So she came out and she was facing me. So as she came out, she was looking up at me. And it was just this incredible. The water bag hadn't broken yet, so she was just looking. I could see her face through the water bag looking up at me. And just an incredible moment. And then the water bag popped and she just slid into my hands. These are things that some people would consider complications. Now, my next baby was the one that I lost, and. And he was born, I believe, several weeks early. He had a congenital heart defect. It's a birth that is definitely used against me by anti home birth advocates. Look what happened? This is what happens. I wasn't blamed by. He came out, he wasn't breathing. I had a very straightforward. I was by myself again. My daughter came in at the last minute, but a very short labor. There was meconium in the water, which there hadn't been before, but I breathed into him when he came out. But he had a congenital heart defect. And so I was. The coroner felt basically everybody did everything they could to reassure me that this was fine, I was not to blame, that this baby just wouldn't have survived regardless of where he would have been born. So even though I wasn't blamed by those who actually examined him and knew that happens, I mean, one in five or sometimes one in four pregnancies end in miscarriage. This, to me, felt like it just. It was a difficult time in my life. And I felt like he just never. The coroner basically said he never developed the body to live. He had pneumonia, sepsis, influenza. He just was not a healthy baby. And it sort of looked to me like it was nature's way. He just, you know, I sort of miscarried. It's just that I was further along than a miscarriage. But, you know, so I don't feel that he would have survived. You know, I believe the coroner. I don't believe he would have survived. But. And this isn't to say that sometimes doctors don't. So I'm not saying that, but I think that there are several things that go on. They make complications out of things that aren't complications. My last baby was born with the cord wrapped around her neck. Now, some people. That's a big one that people freak out about. Oh, my God. What if the cord is wrapped around the neck? Well, about 25% of babies have the cord wrapped around their neck. There's a. A birth attendant. Technically, I guess she's not really considered a midwife just because of legal things. But Gloria Lemay, who has written wonderful things about birth and speaks around the world. So she calls herself, I think, a traditional birth attendant. But she says it's the smart babies that keep the cords wrapped around their necks because it keeps it out of the way. It keeps it from coming out first. Basically, oxygen, blood and oxygen are going through the cord. So if it's around the neck, it's not like it's cutting off, keeping the baby from breathing, because they're not breathing in the womb. They're getting blood and oxygen through the umbilical cord. So about 25% of babies are born with the cord around their necks. One woman wrote to me and said, I've had six babies. All six had the cord wrapped around their necks. All six born at home, all fine. One had it wrapped around twice, one had it wrapped around three times. So it's another thing that people freak out about. And if a baby's coming out with the cord wrapped around their neck, they cut the cord immediately, which they shouldn't do. The baby needs that blood and oxygen. When it was coming out with my baby, I just unwrapped it. I just saw it. I felt it was over around her neck, and I just unwound it as she was coming out. And that one, my husband. That was my last baby. My husband was down the hall. I hadn't even told them I was in labor yet. I just put myself into a very relaxed state. I could feel that. I felt myself sort of step aside. I went to take a bath and she slid into my hands. So, yes, there are times basically, as far as complications, I think that if you can get yourself into the right frame of mind, you greatly minimize your chance of having any complications. And here again, we need to redefine what a complication is, because so many of these things are normal variations of birth. And then there are things that might be a complication that we can deal with on our own. Some people do choose to take an infant resuscitation class if they're having an unassisted birth. I didn't do that. But some people do go that route, and whatever makes you feel better. But I think babies are not born sick. They're not born not breathing. A baby may not breathe right away. They don't have to breathe right away. Generally, they'll start breathing within the first minute, but they're still getting that blood and oxygen through the umbilical cord. As long as a doctor or midwife hasn't come in there and sliced it right away. I'm a believer in waiting until the cord stops pulsating so the baby can get all that blood and oxygen. So I think if you can get yourself. If you don't live a stressful life, if you can get yourself in a peaceful state of mind prior to getting pregnant or during the pregnancy, and certainly during the birth, then the birth should go well. And if something comes up, you know, you can transfer to a hospital if you need to. I think that truly that shouldn't happen very often if you really are in the proper frame of mind. And many things just resolve themselves on their own. And I think even in the case where if you say well, if I were in the hospital, then if there was a complication, then the doctors could deal with it. And what they don't understand is that doctors create so many of the complications that they then claim to fix or maybe do fix. But to me, it's dangerous. I believe personally it's dangerous. Certainly for me, it would have been dangerous. For me, I would have gone into fight flight. If I would have gone into the hospital, I would have triggered those hormones that would have shut down birth. Because that's not where I feel comfortable. And especially now that I know all that I know. And the other thing I'll just briefly touch on is that some people say, well, you can have the best of both worlds by having a midwife at your birth. Why not have a midwife? Well, first of all, because. And I'm not anti midwife and I think there are some wonderful midwives out there. First of all, because for me personally, I didn't feel like I needed one. I felt like I distrust my body. I didn't feel like I needed that kind of guidance from someone. I also did not like the rules and regulations that many midwives adhere to. They're basically, especially in Colorado, they have a long list of things that they're supposed to do. They're supposed to check you for dilation. They're supposed to transfer you to the hospital if you don't show significant progress after your water breaks within 12 hours. I don't want those rules and regulations that I don't believe are based on true science. I don't want someone bringing that to my birth. I also don't want someone bringing their own fears. And anybody that you bring to a birth, whether it's a midwife or a family member, they are going to bring their own fears. And fear is contagious. And pregnant, you know, laboring women can be. You're very open. And if you surround yourself with people that have these fears, or a midwife who's afraid of losing her license, maybe she intuitively feels that she doesn't want to follow these rules and regulations. To me, so that's why I just felt like, no, I don't want any rules and regulations on my birth. And so that's why I chose to do it unassisted. Very cool.

And then what about. Because you briefly touched on that you didn't have that much pain. And I know a lot of the women are curious and we have the movies that show like pushing and painful and screaming and it's chaotic and messy and traumatic and like, so can you talk about that? And then also inside of that, I know in your book and other books that I've read too, there's like the potential for it to actually be even an orgasmic experience, which.

Right, right. Well, I had begun reading for years. I had noticed little passages in birth stories where women were talking about feeling sexual during their labors and actually some of them spontaneously having orgasms. And I've read that really the only difference between a labor contraction and an orgasm is the level of intensity. I've heard about women who say, had strong menstrual pains that turned into an orgasm. So it's like a fine line between pleasure and pain. But in both cases it's a uterine contraction. Why should birth be horrendous? Uterine contractions and orgasms, pleasurable ones. So I think if we can. I think so much of the pain, okay, it's due to fear because we're literally not getting oxygen to the uterus. And so you're starving the uterus. It doesn't have the fuel it needs. So I think that's where so much of the pain comes in. I think, you know, if we are accepting of our sexuality, then that door sort of opens up where we can. It certainly can become more pleasurable. I know that there are women who set out to have an orgasmic birth. And I think in most cases, the women that I know that have had an orgasm in labor spontaneously, it does seem like it is sort of. It is a spontaneous thing. It's not something they exactly planned. They were more support by it. Not that it couldn't happen planned like I'm going to spontaneously have an orgasm in labor. I just haven't talked to anybody that's planned it and then had it. It's been just more. It's just sort of happened. But definitely you can bring sexuality into your labor. I know women who have masturbated during labor. You know, basically you're. Like I said earlier, you're opening that area up. You know, the average vagina widens 2 inches during sexual arousal. I'd rather do that than have an episiotomy. When you are sexually stimulated, then oxytocin starts flowing through your system, both men and women. And that's the very hormone that you need to give birth. So having someone either sexually stimulating yourself or having your partner sexually stimulate you will get those hormones flowing. And you need, say, estrogen, which is another thing that happens when you trigger fight flight. Estrogen production really greatly slows or shuts down. Estrogen is necessary in order for the cervix to soften. There's also a hormone in semen that softens the cervix. And some people say it's better if you're going to have sex in labor, that it's better not to do it after your water breaks. I don't know. In my case, I had sex and labor once and my water hadn't broken yet. But that, first of all, will relax you. And also the semen, I've read that they used to use a product to soften women's cervixes, and it was actually pig semen made from pig semen. Now, I think they use some kind of artificial substance. So I think the more accepting you are of your sexuality, and if you can, certainly if you're at home, and Ina McGaskin talks about this too, that what gets the baby in, gets the baby out. Birth is a sexual experience. It involves the sexual organs. It involves the same hormones. It's part of our sex life. It's the completion of sex. So I think we need to bring sexuality back into birth. And so even things just like massage, anything, but certainly feeling sexual can help all those hormones to start flowing and so that it can be a pleasurable experience. Now, there's the film and the book Orgasmic Birth. And. And there's a woman in the film that they show her she just spontaneously started having an orgasm. And so, you know, and they got it on film. It's like, you can't deny it. That woman is experiencing pleasure. I think when I started writing about these things years ago, so many people said, you know, well, do you have any proof, like photographs or footage of your births? Well, not really. You know, now there's so many wonderful births on YouTube. And if you go to my website, unassistedchildbirth.com I have a wonderful video on the main page of a woman who is giving birth in water. And she's just so relaxed. And I don't want to credit. Some people say, oh, then it's the water. No, the water maybe helped her, but it was her state of mind. She just was. She'd had a painful first birth in the hospital and her second one, she really worked with herself. She took a hypnobirthing course at home that she found helpful. And she had read, I think, my book and my website and just really worked with herself to relax and not interfere. And you can't deny it when you see it. And I really encourage women to look at these birth videos of women giving birth Peacefully. Not that if the woman is screaming through, you know, I'm not condemning women who scream through labor, but I think that to prepare yourself to have a good birth, pick out the peaceful videos. That's what you need to see. We've seen enough of the women screaming. If you have a birth where you're screaming, forgive yourself. Don't judge yourself. You know, it's easier for some women than others, just depending on a lot of factors. But. But watch the peaceful ones and read the peaceful birth stories and that will help you get into that right frame of mind.

So beautiful. So what is, you know, if you were going to send off a woman, a pregnant woman to give birth, what advice would you give her? Physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually? Any of the above?

Well, first of all, I encourage women to rebirth stories because that was so helpful for me. So that's one of the first things I tell people. I've got dozens of birth stories on my site and there's other birth sites that have birth stories. Read birth stories. That's such a great way to learn about birth. You can learn about how women dealt with may be possible things that some people might consider complications. Read real stress stories from real women. As I said, watch the birth videos. And I have a lot of articles on my site that there's just a ton of information out there that they don't have to pay for. If they just want to read the articles that are kind of going a little bit more in depth than what I talked about here and if they feel like they want to read, there's my book, there's Unassisted Childbirth. There's several other books that I sell on my website. Unassisted Home Birth, an act of Love by Lynn Griesmer. There's the Birth Keepers by Veronica Robinson. She's in the uk. She publishes the Mother magazine. There's Lori Morgan's book the Power of Pleasurable Childbirth. These are women who have really grasped these concepts. So they talk about the research they've done and they talk about their own experiences. I encourage women to journal if that's what. If they find that helpful, I encourage them to connect with other women that are planning to give birth unassisted. I think when I was doing this, I didn't know anybody that had done this, and so that was a little bit more challenging for me. But now there are online communities they can join unassisted birth lists. Even women who aren't planning an unassisted birth sometimes join these lists just because it's nice to be around women that believe this is possible, that have faith in themselves, that are not turning themselves over to the authorities or turning to the authorities to, to answer every question. So I think find a community online or several communities online. There's several Facebook pages for women that are giving birth unassisted or just giving birth at home. And so connect with like minded people. Don't go out of your way to necessarily share your plans with everybody because I really kept to myself a lot. I think one of the biggest challenges of having an unassisted birth or even a home birth is dealing with friends and family in a society that thinks you are insane. And so for me it was an opportunity to develop myself and to learn to look to myself and to not be so dependent on my community and on the approval, getting the approval of my family or society. I felt like, okay, I'm not going to get that support out there, I've got to look within. And so it was an opportunity to connect with God or goddess or the larger consciousness. So I think that to me is probably the biggest challenge of giving birth unassisted. The birth itself to me is a breathe. It's dealing with, dealing with either your own fears, if they're really great, but I think it certainly can be dealt with and it certainly was in my case and dealing with the fears of other people. So you don't have to go out and you know, it's your body, your baby. So you don't have to go out and convince everybody else or tell everyone, you know, this is how I'm going to do it and you know, kind of just go within yourself and work on yourself and, and have a relaxed attitude about it and do your research. But for me, doing your research, for me it didn't mean looking at all the things that can go wrong and then looking at how a doctor or midwife would deal with them. I looked at why I felt they were going wrong and then eliminating those causes. So to me it was eliminating poverty, I didn't live in poverty. And then eliminating outside intervention. I did that by not going to a doctor or midwife and then eliminating inside intervention by honestly facing my own fears, paying attention to how I felt on a day to day basis. If something triggered a fear, if I suddenly felt myself being fearful, I would look at, okay, what was I thinking just now? Was I imagining, did someone say something to me? Did I see something? Was there some thought I was having that triggered that feeling. Some people like to monitor their thoughts and see, hey, what am I thinking? Am I thinking this is going to be horrendous or I'm scared or whatever. And other people may feel more comfortable with paying attention to their feelings. And then if they have an unpleasant feeling, then they trace it back and look at what was the thought I was having. So there's ways of figuring out what your limiting beliefs are so that you can honestly face your beliefs. And then if you realize you have a belief that really isn't in keeping with the truth, that really, if you have a belief that childbirth is inherently dangerous, first of all, if you do your research, you'll find out that it isn't. But then say your belief suggestions or say prayers or write down affirmations or whatever it is that can help you and then just let it unfold. I think that's my advice.

Beautiful. Thank you so much. Well, I so appreciate your wisdom. I appreciate you being such a pioneer in the future field and really inspiring us all to take responsibility for our bodies, for our sexuality, for our births, for our babies. It's truly remarkable. Thank you so much.

You're welcome. It was great. I loved it.

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