Birth is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

Ann Davenport

Inside the adobe home of a rural Bolivian village, I sit on a wooden chair

and wait. In this small, candle-lit room, I smell the familiar odors of sweat and

amniotic fluid. With her skirts hiked up to her hips and a wool blanket

wrapped around her for warmth, a laboring woman fixes her gaze and her

energy beyond anything the other partera (midwife) or I can see or understand.

The village partera sits in back of the woman on the bed, supporting her. She

and I remain quiet. We listen to the woman’s groans and grunts and occasional

growls. We don’t interrupt. We tend to breathe to match her rhythms, but we

don’t talk, except to soothe her with our cooing words of encouragement. And

we wait.

Soon, the woman’s hands turn white with a final gasp and grip. She

leans forward, pinches her eyes closed and gives a low, rumbling sound known

best to midwives and mothers – the baby will come now. The head comes out,

turns while the shoulders accommodate the pelvis, and with a rush of warm

Birth is a Force That Gives Us Meaning – Ann Davenport 1

water, a new life plops onto a clean towel between my gloved hands and

mother’s legs. The baby girl opens her eyes and looks around, then gives a

pouty little cry. I want louder lung exercise, so I dry her roughly to stimulate a

bawl. That always works. The mother sits back onto her haunches while the

partera helps me with the baby and placenta. I tie and cut the cord, wrap the

little girl in a fresh towel, and give her to her mother to hold next to her bare

breast. Everyone except the newborn is smiling.

The first voice the baby hears is the low cooing from her mother,

“Welcome, mi amor. We have waited so long for you.”

Then she looks up to us with the glowing knowledge that new mothers

everywhere have and says, “Look! I have given birth! I feel like God at this

moment!” I have heard that same comment everywhere I’ve worked as a

midwife, in every culture, in every country, in every language; woman is the

creator, and she knows it.

What she said in Spanish for “I have given birth” was, literally, “He dado

a luz!” The infinitive verb form dar a Luz means to give to the light – as in “Let

there be light”. This nineteen year old rural, illiterate Bolivian woman knew

how it feels to be a giver of life, a bringer of light, united to and connected with

every other mother throughout time. She walked the fine line between life and

death and became transformed, and reborn, by her own miracle.

Any midwife who has time and the right circumstances (I mean outside a

patriarchal hospital system) may be privileged to participate in this

transformation, this birthing of woman to mother. Midwives know motherhood

Birth is a Force That Gives Us Meaning – Ann Davenport 2

is a gift to the light of consciousness for all humanity, and we recognize it as

the connecting force that maintains the race. Birth is a force that gives us

meaning, just as war is a force that gives men meaning and becomes their

manner of transformation (see philosopher Chris Hedges’ provocative works1

online or in print about the culture and transformative addictive powers of war

and killing in a patriarchal society).

Throughout history, women were known as guardians of the race not

only due to their sacrificial capacity to educate and rear children, but also for

their magical capacity to create a new human by holding blood inside the

womb for nine months. “From the earliest human culture,” writes Barbara

Walker, “the mysterious magic of creation was thought to reside in the blood

women gave forth in apparent harmony with the moon, and which was

sometimes retained in the womb to “coagulate” into a baby. Men regarded this

blood with holy dread, as the life-essence, inexplicably shed without pain,

wholly foreign to male experience.”2 From Aristotle to Pliny to medical school

teachings up to the 18th century, the prenatal function of menstrual blood was

believed to be “the material substance of generation.”3

Most authorities now agree that not only “uncivilized” races today, but

certainly all the world’s people in the prehistoric period, knew nothing of man’s

part in the process of reproduction. It was believed that only women held the

divine power to give life.4 Yet, once men discovered their role in the baby

business (or probably learned the truth from women who were inventors of

calendars based on moon phases), God suddenly became a man, woman

Birth is a Force That Gives Us Meaning – Ann Davenport 3

became a mere “vessel” for seed (of God or of man – see “virgin birth”), and the

business of economic heredity was born. The rest, as they say, is history. For

the past 5,000 years we have all been transformed by patriarchal, god-centered

cultures based on might and revenge, division and conquest, submission and

fear, authority and dominance.

Fortunately, 5,000 years is only a small (and bloody) chapter in the

human story of millions of years, a story that begins with a new page every

minute of every day when a woman trusts herself to give birth and recognizes

herself as Creator. Sadly, this story doesn’t unfold within most patriarchal

hospitals or clinics, where a system of hierarchy dictates the birthing account,

and where the birthing woman is silenced for her own good, in order to better

“manage” the birth, dictated by protocols, technology and fear.

And managed that birth must be! It’s certainly not up the mother where,

when, or how to give birth. Sometimes, it’s not up to her where or when to even

get pregnant. Pregnancy and childbirth, always a transformative process, must

now be entrusted into the maw of technology, the new god. Women have gone

from creating life to being “delivered” of their “product of conception.”

Marsden Wagner, a perinatal epidemiologist, former head of Maternal

and Child Health for the European Office of the World Health Organization

(WHO), and renowned promoter for the humanization of childbirth, says the

following about giving birth back to the mothers, where it belongs, instead of

leaving in the un-human hands of technology: “Humanizing birth means

understanding that the woman giving birth is a human being, not a machine

Birth is a Force That Gives Us Meaning – Ann Davenport 4

and not just a container for making babies. Showing women---half of all

people---that they are inferior and inadequate by taking away their power to

give birth is a tragedy for all society.”

Anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd (University of Texas at Austin) has

dedicated her professional career to enlightening us with chronicles about fear-

based modern medicine and trust-based childbirth. Every midwife and mother

would agree, she writes, that technology can be a life saver in the right

circumstances, and none of us disagree with the marvels of modern medical

treatments. Every mother and midwife would also recognize Robbie’s discourse

on our current technocratic model of childbirth, based on the construct of

separation, versus our longed-for humanistic model based on connection. (See

side box)

How have we come to find ourselves so disconnected from our humanity,

and how is that disconnect related to a fear-filled childbirth? For millions of

years, the act of birth was centered on the woman, and not the person who

“delivered” her. Many of us know that the separation of woman from Creator

occurred with the suppression of our own natural Goddess imagery in favor of

an imposed masculine, alien, hierarchical system – a belief system that

imposes authority from outside instead of from within; in other words, from

Jewish, Christian and Muslim credence (among other male god-centered

religions). Humanity was taught to believe the stories of a vengeful god, of a

righteous and punishing religious tradition, and to believe a doctrine based on

fear, on separation, and on the concept of sin/redemption by earned affection.

Birth is a Force That Gives Us Meaning – Ann Davenport 5

 We also have to believe that man was made in god’s image, that woman

was made to serve both god and man, and that woman is a carrier for this

god/man’s seed – with woman as mal-functioning machine and man as sole

creator because he is the son of god. Five thousand years, friends. But not five

million. And not during the five minutes when we may experience our baby

slipping from within us – if we are allowed to experience it.

No ethics and no religion can change that holy experience, which some

men may be privileged to witness. During that birth, a baby is born, a mother

is born, a father is born, and a family is born. Birth is a force that gives us

meaning, that connects and unites us, that transforms humanity, and that

light the way to recognize the Goddess in each of us. Hail Mary, mother of

gods, thank you for giving us the light of consciousness to know you – to know

that we are in you, you are in us, and we are all One.

###

Birth is a Force That Gives Us Meaning – Ann Davenport 6

1
Chris Hedges, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Anchor Books, div. of Random House, New
York, 2002
2
Barbara Walker, The Encyclopedia of Women’s Myths and Secrets, Harper Collins, New York, 1983
3
Sir James Frazier, The Golden Bough, Macmillan, New York, 1922
4
see Merle Stone’s archeological masterpiece, “When God Was a Woman”, Dial Press, New York, 1976

-- -- -- -- SIDE BOX -- -- -- -- -- --

TECHNOCRATIC MODEL OF CARE

BASIC PRINCIPLE = SEPARATION

1. MECHANIZATION OF THE BODY

2. ISOLATION AND THE OBJECTIFICATION OF THE PATIENT
3. FOCUS ON CURING DISEASE, REPAIRING DYSFUNCTION
4. AGGRESSIVE, INTERVENTIONIST APPROACH TO DIAGNOSIS AND TREATMENT
5. ALIENATION OF PRACTITIONER FROM PATIENT
6. RELIANCE ON EXTERNAL DIAGNOSIS
7. SUPER VALUATION OF TECHNOLOGY
8. HIERARCHICAL ORGANIZATION (PATIENT IS SUBORDINATE TO PRACTITIONER AND TO INSTITUTION)
9. AUTHORITY AND RESPONSIBILITY INHERENT IN THE PRACTITIONER

HUMANISTIC MODEL OF CARE:

BASIC PRINCIPLE = RESPECT

1. THE INDIVIDUAL IS TO BE VALUED AS UNIQUE AND WORTHY

2. THE BODY IS AN ORGANISM, NOT A MACHINE
3. THE WHOLE PERSON SHOULD ALWAYS BE CONSIDERED
4. THE NEEDS OF THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE INSTITUTION SHOULD BE BALANCED
5. INFORMATION, DECISION-MAKING, AND RESPONSIBILITY SHOULD BE SHARED BETWEEN PROVIDER AND
PATIENT
6. EMPATHETIC COMMUNICATION – INCLUDING EYE CONTACT AND TOUCH - ESSENTIAL TO HEALING

ROBBIE DAVIS-FLOYD, PHD

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ONHUMANIZATION OF CHILDBIRTH
FORTALEZA, BRAZIL (NOV 2000)