A day with Ina May

This past Tuesday, I had the pleasure of attending a seminar with noted midwife Ina May Gaskin. For those of you who haven't heard of her, she is the midwife at The Farm in Tennessee. It's an old hippie commune that actually worked and still in existence. She became the midwife there partly by need, and partly in response to her own bad labor and delivery experience. The farm was founded in 1970, and soon after that they members started having babies. As they had no health insurance, \ Ina May had to learn how to do it using her smarts, an Obstetrics textbook, and the mentoring of a local doctor. She is a self-taught midwife and has also learned from many traditional midwives, and it seemed like anything she saw that worked, she did. I also discovered that she is the demagogue of the midwife movement as all of the midwives and doulas that were there idealized her.

I was struck by her humility and her compassion. She talked at one point about women who have died in childbirth and I could see, even though she had no involvement with the cases, that they hurt her deeply. And when she talked about births she's attended, she spoke with real love for each of the women who were laboring. It was very inspiring.

I was also stuck by her attitude towards childbirth. She sees it as a healthy and normal part of life. She talked about how she attended over 100 births before one required a c-section. And then she said most OB students haven't seen any births before they learn all of the things that can go wrong, and immediately they begin to view birth as a dangerous and potentially lethal process. So all of their interventions are based in the fear of something going wrong.

I had read her book Ina May's Guide to Childbirth while in the states and the thing that most impressed me was her statistics. The c-section rate at the farm is 2%. Compare that to the national average of 20-30%. They deliver breach babies at the farm, which is not done almost anywhere else in the US, and still they have a lower c-section rate. Her statistics were so good that any hospital in the country would be proud to have them, but yet, she told stories of being kicked out of hospitals and prevented from publishing in medical journals. While she was willing to learn from anyone about techniques that worked, her stories reinforced my belief that the medical institution is more concerned, at least with in regards to childbirth, with it's own ego than with finding things that work.

It also made me realize that many of the standard interventions that western medicine does to prevent problems are probably causing more severe problems than they are preventing. Though some of her ideas would not work on a larger scale, or in a city hospital, and are really suited for a small town/community like the farm. But many of her ideas are readily applicable to the modern birthing situation: Giving the mother time to labor without rushing things, not using medicine unless absolutely necessary, allowing c-sections only as a last resort when absolutely medically necessary, and teaching women that laboring is a natural process not something to be feared.