Every birth is holy. I think that an accoucheuse must be spiritual because the energy she is working with is holy. She needs to recognize that other people’s energy is sacred. [1]
An accoucheuse is merely defined by one writer as “nothing more nor less than a skilled specialist in normal birth.” [2]
Other names include sage-femme or “wise woman” (French), jordmor or “earth mother” (Danish), whereas accoucheuse comes from Middle English midwif, meaning one who is “with [a pregnant] woman” [3]; from these definitions of an accoucheuse, one can begin to see that many cultures attach more importance than the first definition here seems to denote.
More common in Native American cultures are women as ethnobotanists, therapists, and leaders of ceremony — some of whom would be accoucheuses as well. [4] Furthermore, in indigenous cultures such as Native American cultures, it is more common to find what Western scholars would divide as religion, culture, and healing, all combined in one connected cultural system or lifeway. [5]
In order to broaden an understanding of the woman, birth, obstetrics, nature, and the body, this paper seeks to apply concepts more kindred to the connected, rather than compartmentalized traditions so common in indigenous peoples.
Inherent in a process such as a culture’s birthing traditions and knowledge are elements of faith or spirituality, empirical science, myth, ethnobotany, medicine, oral narrative, social psychology, and so on, and so the plethora of areas of humanity must be acknowledged and considered when seeking to understand the natural, most basic human sacrament of birth in its relation to humans.
As such, obstetrics cannot be limited by simplistic, massive definitions but must be understood as a rich, complex, and superimposed tradition very much adapted to the cultures that utilize it; moreover, future progress in Western gender relations, attitudes toward women, the body, nature, and birth depends on revising the dominant patriarchal, Christian, hierarchical, overly rational, and scientific systems in place which repress the woman, nature, and by extension, the natural birthing process.
For many of those involved in a birth, much more than a materialist, textbook definition is required to convey any of the deep meaning and feelings of the experience. Indeed, everyone’s requirement for life is birth, and as such, each of us should think twice about what it took to get us from “there” to “here.” With the woman, then, as the gateway, the midwife acts as a kind of attendant or guide in the process of bringing forth new life into the world, and as shall be soon discussed, obstetrics is quite common across the entire planet.
Midwives and their potentially broad scope of functions
Although most people born within mainstream American culture would not likely guess it based on their own experiences and those of most of their peers and family, 80 percent of the world’s children are estimated to be delivered by midwives.
Traditions are passed down in various ways—often midwives are seen coming from a family already incorporating many midwives, while others perceive a calling through a dream, interaction with the divine, or through the reading of an illness as a calling, among other examples. In the Native American Assiniboine culture, almost all of the older women were found to be midwives, along with a large majority of the women in their middle age.
The roles of midwives vary as per the needs of the culture. If in a particular setting, the people have close access to both traditional priest-doctor therapists and also are within reach of a Western medical establishment and trust in its methods, a midwife’s expected role would possibly be less than in a distant rural scene with possibly only one medical doctor or nurse.
Besides, the scope of a midwife’s expected times to care for a woman can vary widely. For example, in mainstream American society, a nurse-midwife would possibly assist a woman in her process for a week prior to birth and remain for hours after the post-natal period. In Mexican indigenous obstetrics, for example, there is a strong emphasis on prenatal care in the form of herbs and herbal teas, ritual cleaning and purification, and massage, which could be weeks before delivery.
Similarly, the care of a midwife for a woman and child can extend beyond a typical post-natal period of a week to a few days, possibly visiting recurrently for months or years following—perhaps to give advice on feeding a newborn child or easing its crying, to even provide marriage guidance, or to lend an ear to the private concerns of a mother which the father might not understand or be concerned with. It, of course, depends on the culture; for example, to again cite Mexican midwife traditions, midwives are expected and seen capable of leading spiritual rites concerning not only the children of mothers they helped birth but often times concerning general community or family issues.
Even more acutely in indigenous obstetrics is the instance of some midwives as curers, sought after to assist issues such as a woman’s fertility or a newborn illness, but again also possibly extending to general areas depending on the midwife’s knowledge and abilities, ranging in approaches from what one writer describes as a spectrum of approaches from the increasingly spiritually oriented priest-doctor approaches which would imply prayers to Gods, spirits, or forces, to a very secular, materially oriented physician approach, such as herbalism, bone setting, or in towns large enough and within access of the people, referrals to a doctor, and so forth.
No matter what the setting, the overarching principle of midwives across cultures is the facilitation of a woman in a normal birthing process in most often the most natural manner as possible, often also providing physical and spiritual support for both the mother and child.
In today’s increasingly secular, scientifically oriented society, the potential for a sense of sacrality and sanctity so due in the miracle of birth becomes less and less, though it is exactly this recognition of greatness and awesomeness in a woman’s power to continue the cycle of life which should mandate a reverent, sacralizing approach.
Nature, the Body, Life & Birth as Sacred
To one who understands the true organic structure of Shakti, or the female principle, it is obvious that she is very well-designed by God to be self-acting. We are the perfect flower of eons of experiment—every individual alive has a perfectly unbroken line of ancestors who were able to hold babies naturally, back for several millions of years.
We are the hand-selected best at it. The spiritual midwife, therefore, is never without the real tools of her trade: she uses the millennia-old, God-given insights and intuition as her tools—in addition to, but often in place of, the hospital’s technology, drugs, and equipment. [12]
Part of the ideals inherent in obstetrics is not only an acceptance of the body and its natural ability to give birth as okay or good—though this is definitely a step up from a Christian-based notion of a tainted, cursed body—but a wholehearted faith and confidence in its ability.
The body is sacred, and so is nature both in and out of the body as it works with the divine to bring new life into the world. Part of this is also an ideal and expectation that it is perfectly acceptable and even advantageous to have birth in the most natural, most psychologically and spiritually safe place as possible. Although perhaps not the most evidently natural, often the desired place is the home of the mother-to-be.
Around the time of pregnancy in Assiniboine culture, all men and children leave the home, and the mother-to-be’s mother and other experienced women are invited in. Most often, midwives will go to the mother instead of as most tend to think of the clinical approach of a patient having to go to her doctor.
A large part of not going to an institution such as a hospital is, as Barbara Katz Rothman argues, not only unnatural and seems to expect abnormality or complications in what is likely a perfectly uncomplicated, natural birth waiting to happen, but a disempowerment of the woman. [13]
In a hospital, male-dominated as many professional domains in the modern Western world, a woman is subject to the doctor-patient hierarchy which already puts the woman at a loss of power in relation to her physician. Should the mother-to-be be using the services of a midwife or nurse-midwife, she too is likely to be held lower in the professional ladder than the doctor-boss, though possibly now in a position of greater power than the woman in her care.
Seen here are the defects of hierarchy, instead of heterarchy in which individuals are allowed to interact ‘horizontally,’ instead of a perpendicular hierarchical concatenation of bid. So, to escape this, and possibly as an extension of the hallowing of the organic structure and nature, the home becomes sought after as the place to give birth.
Ecofeminism links feminist ideology with ecology, which, in one case, can be used to understand why nature has become so debased. By relating the “self/other relationship among persons to the self/other relationship of single and nature,” one can begin to inquire into the possibility of the vast implications of excessive hierarchy and monological ideologies, not only for the relationship between human individuals and nature, but between individuals and each other, individuals and their own bodies, and of course, the distinctness of a child versus an adult or a non-birthing man and his 3rd-trimester pregnant patient. [14]
Revisioning and refashioning a male-dominated approach to the organic structure, nature, and femininity
Suzanne Arms, in her work Immaculate Deception, depicts an early humanity in which man, unaware of the connection between sexual intercourse and gestation, or between seed and a growing plant, comes to associate women with both the amazing vitalizing power of birth and of plant extension, as well as with death, as its potency is seen in the blood, both of menstruation and childbearing, and in the death not uncommon in childbearing.
The power to create human and plant life seen without any causal connection to sexual intercourse and fertilization made the process all the more mysterious, as if, to use the words of Suzanne Arms in her work, Immaculate Deception, “only woman could create life in her own body and in the body of the Earth.” [15]
On one hand, this amazing mysteriousness in scenes other than the contemporary Western situation has seemed to have led to a well-deserved respect for women, the ability of nature to perform birth upon the perfectly able bodies of women, and by extension, this respect and appreciation would go to the midwives who facilitate their births.
It might also be argued that this powerful, normally viewed as sacred and divine, power of birth did not bode well in the modern Christian epoch and in the millennia leading up to it. Men have sought fearfully and in vain to somehow quash the female body and inherent power of a woman and mother, leading to current states in which a hospitalized birth removes almost all power and choice from a woman.
Hospitals employ as much of the latest technology as possible and treat each birth from onset as if the body has already failed in every way possible to independently deliver life into the world. Consequently, women as minds are taught to think as men and to accept the norm of male-centered ideologies, which are inherently misogynistic and hierarchical. This plays out in several ways in respect to birth in the United States, as seen in contentions between a more male-dominated domain of physicians and the more female-centered midwife or nurse-midwife group.
Both the pregnant woman and midwives are subjected to this system as the woman, upon entering the hospital, is understood to be under the authority of her physician or obstetrician, and the associated hierarchy. The midwives are subject to an oppressive, male-dominated hierarchy that would be inclined to nullify the authority of anyone threatening their power, such as nurse-midwives.
Interrupting through a Christian damnation of the woman, nature, and the body
Although medicine and a significant body of information related to the birthing process had been developed in ancient Greek and Roman civilizations by doctors in a separate domain, midwifery continued in a culture where bodily processes were exalted, rather than despised, in fact to the degree of “godliness,” claims Arms, such that the mysterious and instinctual knowledge of midwifery was passed on rather than being suppressed.
Arms goes on to argue that since two thousand years ago with the birth of Christianity, the Western Christian world has continued a development of the belief that “childbirth is inherently dangerous, hazardous, painful, and terrifying,” as well as a declaration of God’s curse on all women.
Having eaten the apple of Original Sin, Eve brings upon all women the guilt of this sin seen manifest by their penalty by God to give birth, pain, blood, and all. This sets up the current misogynistic situation in which men view women as “less than equal, shamed, sinful, and debased” in relation to their male counterparts.
Rather than embodying the two values of mystical creation and destruction, the emergence of the virgin/whore duality provided an either/or option, the former leading to God and the latter leading to sin. Humanity must pass into this sinful world through the physical gateway of a woman’s sinful and shamed body. [21]
Midwifery changed from something more elevated in Greek and Roman societies to debased and cursed, with “intuitive knowledge of childbirth” having become substituted for “fearful expectations of Byzantine torment.” [22]
It appears as if not much has changed in these expectations of birth since the beginnings of Christianity, through the Middle Ages, and through to the present time. Midwifery and witchcraft became linked in this Christian paradigm, greatly concerned with sin and redemption, in which a woman trying to ease a birthing woman’s God-mandated pain was branded a witch. [23]
Witchcraft, according to Arms, was a continuation of the cult of fertility that existed before Christianity, when a woman was free to accept and love her body and the powers it contained. [24] Not only can this effect be seen historically, as with the death of Ann Hutchinson.
A midwife in early colonial times of the United States who was excommunicated and banished in Massachusetts, [25] but even in recent times, in the city of Merida, Yucatan, a Mayan midwife named Dona Delia chooses not to express the prayers of safety she learned from her father during a birth for fear of being cast as a witch. [26]
The revival of midwifery alone will probably not be enough to inform modern women of their right to love and trust their bodies; it would take a different culture with values and systems designed to foster such awareness, love, trust, and compassion across the sexes and ultimately, for the love of humanity and the world in its real future, children. The question remaining is how to fulfill such a culture-bending task, and the answer could probably fill volumes.
Pedagogical Positions: How to Pass on a New Paradigm
The midwifery principle — of an experienced individual assisting a less experienced person, likely a community member, dealing with what is expected to be a normal process, in this case, birth — can be applied to society at large.
For example, a parallel could be drawn between the relationship of a midwife and the woman in her care, and the community which helps conduct a girl into womanhood in the girl’s puberty ceremony in the Mescalero-Apache tribe of New Mexico.
Here, a young woman participates in a rite of passage in which she is taught to develop a positive self-identity, taught tribal history, taught to be a mother, tribeswoman, human, etc., taught the beginnings of herbalism, taught about and how to prevent pregnancy, and how to interpret her first experiences with a romantic other, and more. [27]
By and large, youth in the United States do not receive such an experience and are faced with learning about some of the most confusing, potentially distressing concepts both ideologically and physically from equally ignorant peers. Most often, as youth do not want to appear “out of the loop” in terms of pubescent knowledge, fact is fabricated and confusion and fear spread among a young culture.
Some youth are fortunate enough to have an open enough relationship with their parents or other close people, or possibly through a mentoring agency, but many do not.
This is one place where the idea of “midwifery” as an experienced peer, not necessarily the same as a mentor for troubled children — such a parallel might be seen as a nurse-midwife versus a midwife, where one is trained from a foundation of assisting sick people, and the other from a starting point of false health and normality — but someone less institutionalized, less as a worker and more as a friend, community member, or slightly older peer, in this case.
In one example of this appropriation of a midwife symbology, Patrick Murphy uses the idea of a Trickster Midwife teaching method in breaking through “phallocratic, androcentric ideologies” which patriarchy has secured since its rise “throughout a long history of political and cultural systems.” [28]
His approach is more specifically aimed at education, as feminist pedagogy is being evolved alongside other feminist disciplines, in a system based more on a dialogue and an interchange of ideas rather than a unidirectional, “monolithic” and “monological” ideology based on hierarchical authority, and instead dialogical and heterarchical or vertical instead of horizontal. [29]
Creative uses of themes, roles, and powers associated with women, nature, and birth should be explored and incorporated into a society that wishes to expand its consciousness, appreciation, and value of life, and as such, research to this end ought to be pursued.
Decision
For me, a male chauvinist, patriarchal society encourages at least two great mistakes: not only are women deprived of an equal relationship with men and society at large, being repressed, oppressed, omitted, and resented; but men too are also limited as human beings by their dominating gender as males, doing what they must to “be a man” and rejecting at all costs any identification with a feminine perspective or experience.
People are too busy being one sex or the other rather than being, first and foremost, loving human beings. Humans whose primary self-identification and self-perceptions lie in their sex reduce themselves to half a human, as humans are a complex of both male and female principles, raised most commonly (at least in part) by a mother and a father.
In this same manner, a society that does not respect or understand, and consequently, does not trust or rely upon, the other, people are drawn more towards independence and disjunction. The self becomes the focus, and instant satisfaction can take hold, and society begins to lose sight of some of the most important things to its being, like birth and the future of children, not only during birth but in the approximately 20 years in which society must secure and raise it from an identity-less, language-less thing into a full-fledged human being (or human becoming).
To these ends should society direct its heart and focus, and only then can we be safe for both the future of humanity in its children but for the future of its home. Being likely to come with a compassion for babies, women, and the nature that brings the babies into the world in and through women is a compassion for the physical world itself and all its beauty and wonder. Let us hope and strive.
References:
- Gaskin, Ina May. Spiritual Midwifery. Book Pub. Co., Summertown: 1977, p. 282.
- Arms, Suzanne. Immaculate Misrepresentation: a new look at women and childbearing in America. Houghton and Mifflin, Boston: 1975, p. 151.
- Online dictionary. http://dictionary.reference.com/entry: “midwife”. Accessed on 3/22/2007.
- RS 192 Lecture. 1/12/2007.
- RS 192 Lecture. 1/12/2007.
- Arms, 154.
- Huber, Brad, ed. Mesoamerican Healers. University of Texas Press, Austin: 2001, p. 148-149.
- Denig, Edwin Thompson. The Assiniboine. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman: 2000, p. 516.
- Huber, 146-147.
- Ibid, 154.
- Ibid, 155-156.
- Gaskin, 283.
- Earle, Sarah, ed. Gender, Identity & Reproduction: Social Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, Hampshire: 2003, p. 83.
- Murphy, Patrick D. Literature, Nature, and Other: ecofeminist reviews. State University of New York Press, Albany: 1995, p. 140-141.
- Arms, 9.
