A quick note: I have a deep respect for midwives as individuals, as they do one of the hardest jobs on the planet. Midwives have been persecuted and harmed for hundreds of years in patriarchal cultures around the world. I know that midwives are doing their best with what they know, what they have access to, and with the cultural perspective of the women they serve. My depth of inquiry is about birth itself and the cultural beliefs we have around birth, which of course includes midwifery as a system of thought. None of my beliefs are black-and-white, and I anchor in evolutionary biology and cultural anthropology perspectives as I analyze birth. This is MY truth, and so I speak it in the way that makes sense for me.

It’s been 17 years since I gave birth to my son at home, intentionally unassisted (you can read that story here). Since that time, I’ve seen freebirth go from a super fringe choice to something more trendy and far more acceptable in certain circles (it’s still pretty fringe overall). 

I’ve observed a lot and had years to study, ponder, and witness birth, as well as to consider the highly opinionated perspectives on all sides of the “natural birth” movement. I’ve also had a lot of years of developing intellectually, an evolution of philosophies, and a general maturing in the way I perceive black and white absolutes.

My general consensus is that birth is never one thing and there is no such thing in material reality as a “good” or “bad” birth. Those are all labels we apply to experiences that come from our cultural lenses. Birth itself simply occurs as a physical and biological mammalian function of life. 

Our emotional interpretation of the physical experience is where we start to attach labels of right and wrong, traumatizing or non-traumatizing (and is a highly human-centric experience). It’s where we construct a story of how things went wonderfully right or horribly wrong. And those stories matter, because they impact our relationships with ourselves and others. But it’s also important to recognize them as stories, because stories are malleable and healable.

Some women have perfectly beautiful births in highly medicalized settings. Some have traumatizing births in the least medically interventive settings possible. (Though typically these scenarios are flipped.) Most everyone falls somewhere in the spectrum in between.

Birth is a Somatic Experience

I personally am completely in love with the process and experience of birth because it is one of the most highly mammalian and instinctual experiences anyone will ever go through. There’s not a lot in life that can replicate the force and intensity of a body following its biological map in that way. 

I am constantly comparing other experiences and philosophies to birth, as it is such a primal template and connects to essentially everything that we will go through in life. Giving birth is life itself in an intensely compacted timeline. 

All the elements are there: death of the old, birth of the new, pain, pleasure, rebirth, bodily changes (for better or worse), dark night of the soul, wandering in the land of the lost, being pulled deep into your body to find your wisest self, facing the parts of yourself you don’t necessarily like, grief, loss. And the realization that while you can rely on others for support, this is YOUR experience alone.

It’s the most intense right of passage one could be invited into. It’s the seat of women’s power to create and end life that so many men have jealously tried to capture power over for thousands of years.

Birth is also the most (naturally/automatically occurring) somatic experience you will ever have, aside from death. These mirrors of birth and death pull us deep, deep into our bodies in ways we cannot escape from. There’s no “turning off” birth unless you turn to a medical system that loves to suppress symptoms (and, of course, there is a time and place for that in very specific and rare situations).

This is why trauma-informed birth care is so damn important. Once you awaken the somatic self, the body tries desperately to heal old nervous system-stored wounds through the intense journey of birth. Without an aware and intentional guide (self, others, or both), birth can deepen the trauma instead of heal it.

While seen as a purely medical event in our society, birth is actually more of a shamanic and spiritual journey. Our indigenous ancestors knew this and treated birth as a spiritual experience with a sacred intensity. It’s an invitation deeper into the self. It’s a place where you’re stretched, are invited to find the seat of your most intense power, and come out roaring with the expression of your whole being.

And in the wrong hands, birth can turn us into small, vulnerable, disempowered children who feel unexpressed, betrayed, abandoned, and punished.

Birth is quite simply that powerful.

How Unassisted Birth Fits Into This View

Freebirth is nothing new. It’s the original way of giving birth for all mammals. Our beautiful and intricate hormone system thrives on privacy and autonomy in birth. In an empowered state, we crave being left alone to listen to the intense calls of our bodies (with trustworthy people present or not). 

The medicalization of birth does not honor human females as the biological and spiritual creatures that we are. It sees us as mechanical and birth as a dangerous event that needs to be controlled (as patriarchal culture likes to control all things female).

The funny part of this all is that birth is still a relative mystery to science, no matter how many cadavers they inspect or women they observe or hormones they play with in test tubes.

Birth is a beautiful mystery that can only be experienced, not dissected and studied into understanding.

This medical system’s attempt to control the female body has led a large number of women to feel a lot of mistrust of medical professionals. And rightly so. The more meddling that happens in a normal, healthy birth (which is 90-95%+ of births), the worse the outcomes (there are a zillion studies that prove this over and over again).

And when this happens, women often feel: Disempowered. Small. Broken. Restrained. Shut down. Dissociated. Disembodied. Anxious. Depressed. Abandoned. Lonely. Lost. Untrusting of their bodies. Disconnected from their souls.

The medicalization of birth has had disastrous consequences on women’s relationships with their bodies and their ability to trust biological and spiritual processes…and most devastatingly, their ability to trust themselves.

And so some women started saying fuck you to the medical system and headed home to have their babies once again. And the current iteration of the American homebirth midwifery model was born.

But…

As the decades passed, more and more of these midwives sought legitimacy and access to the medical resources that Nurse Midwives had. They were tired of being “illegal” and tired of going to jail for practicing species-appropriate birth support.

And so homebirth midwives became more and more medically-oriented (some more than others). Traditional and spiritual midwifery was all but tossed aside in a push to become legally recognized.

As these midwives started to meddle more and practice more legally defensive styles of midwifery, women once again realized that even at home they didn’t feel truly autonomous or safe. Yes, homebirth midwives do sometimes cause trauma and can interrupt the process of a physiological birth. 

Some of them don’t see themselves as spiritual guides and healers, and instead lean toward the technocratic medical model. Many are wounded healers attempting to heal their wounds through their work (as is so common in healing professions).

And many still do understand their roles as healers, especially those who learn and practice from a traditional midwifery perspective. (Though the laws are beginning to favor increased medicalization, as midwives attempt to be accepted by a legal system that favors obsessing about liability and “covering our asses” over doing the right thing. This is pushing out the possibility of traditional midwifery as an option for practice, ironically leading to traditional midwifery being illegal and socially shunned once again.)

And so unassisted birth was reborn as an option for women who wanted complete autonomy in their birth experience. It became an option for those who either just wanted to birth alone or for those who would have preferred to have a supportive guide that didn’t meddle, but didn’t have access to one.

The Last 10 Years of Freebirth

Over the past decade, I’ve watched some interesting trends develop. What was considered super fringe and “alternative” has become more appealing to people from the mainstream. This is partially thanks to social media’s ability to communicate complex topics (at a superficial level) at a rapidly spreading pace. 

The dark side of this is that often people make choices based on how it will make them look to their social media followers - the pretty photos they will post about whatever it is that they’re into. How they will develop a highly unique identity based on fringe things that make them look “cool.”

I realize that’s a harsh statement, but it is very much one of the drivers of the growth of home birth in the United States, including freebirth.

The unfortunate aspect of this is that homebirth and freebirth used to be something only the truly committed and passionate would discover and participate in (to a certain degree). But as it’s gotten more trendy, those who see it as simply a “spa” experience of birth are also choosing it. While this can develop into something more meaningful and empowering for some people, in many cases this also means people are choosing this model who haven’t yet put in the work of developing mental self-responsibility in how they approach their body and their medical care.

This leads to more women signing up for homebirths who aren’t approaching birth from a whole-life transformation experience. This can lead to less desirable birth outcomes and more hospital transfers (especially for women who aren’t truly mentally prepared for the intensity of unmedicated, free-range birth). Midwives have a more intense load of responsibility in these situations, as their clients aren’t taking on the level of self-responsibility they used to show up with in past decades. And therefore, often blame the midwife when things go sideways in the birthing process (even when it's pretty clear it wasn’t something the midwife could have caused). 

As a society we are becoming less responsible for our bodies and our experiences of our bodies, and we’re looking around us to assign blame in whatever ways might make us feel relieved of responsibility for experiences we don’t like.

In the unassisted birth world, this is even more dangerous, as it looks like women who are not understanding the degree of responsibility they are taking on and therefore their births are occasionally ending in disastrous ways. Freebirth is often sold as “natural” and therefore something you don’t really need to prepare for (playing into the naturalistic fallacy instead of approaching things from a more realistic perspective).

The truth is that birth is ALWAYS something you need to prepare for, no matter how or where you give birth.

You owe that to yourself and you owe it to your baby.

What Freebirth Could Be

In my perspective, freebirth is a state of mind. In the complex hormonal cascade that triggers the start of labor, takes our bodies through the birthing process, completes the process of birth, and then establishes bonding and breastfeeding with our newborns… our mind is the main driver of the experience.

Birth is a complex conversation between our hormones, our nervous system, communication from the baby, and our mind’s interpretation of what is happening. The mind has the final say, as, if we are perceiving things as scary or unsafe, we trigger stress hormones which then disturb the delicate balance of the hormones involved in the birthing process. 

And, so I say again: freebirth is a state of mind. It’s not a label or an identity or a specific environment (though environment can be a crucial piece of the puzzle). It’s a perception of power and where that power is coming from.

When you’re giving birth, are you feeling the power pouring out from inside of you? Or do you feel like you’ve given that power to an “expert” to whom you’ve entrusted to tell you what to do? (Neither answer is right or wrong, but honesty helps us to acknowledge where we’re coming from and how it aligns with our values.)

Freebirth as we see it today is a forced situation in which you haven’t invited anyone into your space who might interrupt your delicate hormonal flow, and in which you’ve committed to keeping your power intact (where the only way out of this forced state is going to the hospital or the midwife-dreaded call of “come save me!”). 

But from the view of freebirth as a mindset, we can make choices, have various birth experiences, say yes to some things and no to others, and it can all come from a place of self-honesty and power from within. 

Autonomy and sovereignty is a sense that comes from inside of us. Yes, particular environments either create the conditions that make it easy or very difficult to act on our autonomy. But we always have choices in how we perceive our own sense of power, regardless of the environment.

Cultivating this sense in women takes away the need for conditions to always be perfect and instead builds up an ability for them to trust their own needs and decisions, thereby empowering the entire process (no matter what paths their journeys end up taking). It also allows them to process difficult experiences in ways that are healthier and is less likely to lead to lasting trauma or stuck narratives.

Freebirth Gets All the Gold Stars (and other destructive perspectives)

Our culture loves to create hierarchies of “most wanted” and “least wanted” and then attach someone’s intrinsic value to those hierarchies. In the natural parenting realm, we do this hardcore. 

Freebirth is supposedly the coolest of them all, so it gets the most gold stars. Homebirth with a cool midwife is just slightly lower on that tier, followed close behind by birth center birth. Next, is unmedicated birth in a hospital with a nurse midwife… and so on and so forth. 

(This also applies to parenting methods, feeding methods, etc. In the disempowered male-dominated society model, all women are judged harshly by their “good mother” choices and how well they represent this myth of the “good mother.”)

But this is the very problem with our entire holistic birth approach. And the reason why some women choose things that aren’t a good fit for them at that moment. And why some women don’t reach out for help when they need it (because they think they “shouldn’t” need it). And why homebirthing/freebirthing women are not at all immune to the effects of postpartum mood struggles (among other reasons, of course).

Being perceived as cool isn’t an embodied approach to birth and isn’t how we should be supporting women in finding their power. Instagrammable photos aren’t necessarily expressions of power or embodiment. They’re often gold stars, unhealthy identity development, and marketing. (And I’m saying this as a birth photographer of 13 years, so I come from a place of experience and feminist analysis - the birth photos themselves aren’t problematic, but the intentions behind them can be.)

We re-power women when we teach them that freebirth is an autonomous state of mind and they hold the seat of power. They direct their birth experiences, make the choices, and lean into the whisperings of their intuition. They KEEP the power, throughout the whole experience. No matter how much medical assistance they do or do not need or want.

Women get free when they remember that THEY are WHOLLY responsible for their lives and their bodies’ experiences. Not their doctors, not their midwives, not their doulas, not their traditional birth attendants, not their partners, not their mothers or sisters or aunts.

Why Freebirth Probably Isn’t Right For You

Nope, I’m not going to launch into a rant telling you how “dangerous” freebirth is. Because only you can decide that for yourself. Danger is a perception and an analysis of risk that only you can make for your own life. Only YOU know your body and your relationship with your body (if you’re willing to get honest with yourself). 

You know how capable you are of handling intense experiences. You know how much work you’ve put into healing past traumas. You know how good you are at critically thinking about choices and avoiding black-and-white/ego-based thinking. You know what kind of support is around you and how protected you feel by those you love.

Only you know if freebirth is a good idea for you or not. 

But I am going to tell you why freebirth probably isn’t what you really want or what your soul is craving…

First and foremost, humans are social creatures. We are community-oriented mammals and so our nervous systems are constantly seeking each other out. Why? Because we co-regulate. That’s why non-romantic touch can feel so good and so healing (massage, bodywork, etc.). When our nervous systems are activated (fight/flight/freeze) and causing us to feel like we’re freaking out, being next to someone that feels safe and calm can be an immense support in helping us to get back into our parasympathetic nervous system (calm, embodied, and feeling safe again).

How does this apply to birth?

Most of us want another safe, sister-like woman with us throughout the experience of pregnancy, birth, and postpartum. And, as I said above, birth is a highly spiritual journey. It’s often a dark night of the soul. Having a healer and spiritual guide can be a beautiful and sometimes necessary part of the journey. Having someone calm and gentle to co-regulate with when we’re starting to feel unmoored can be a lifeline. (And it’s also true that we are fully capable of re-grounding ourselves, as needed/wanted - we are not passive but powerful.)

We want our trustworthy and supportive sisters in birth. We want them around to talk to. To feed us. To powerfully hold our hands. To tell us funny stories. To cry with us. To listen to us repeat ourselves over and over again. To listen when we feel lost and cry out “I can’t do this!” To reflect back our power and remind us that we are divine beings having embodied spiritual experiences. To contain the power within our sphere and anchored in our center (not in theirs).

We want to be able to deeply and fully trust our sisters in birth. To have sisters who are there to serve *us*, instead of their own fears and agendas. To have sisters who are more than happy to gather everyone up and head to another part of the house, so we can be alone with our mammalian instincts and shamanic mind-state when we need that. To come back in when we call for them. Full trust in us and our instincts; zero manipulation and coercion. Pure emanation of love and belief in our power.

We want our sisters to marvel over how incredible we were throughout the journey, no matter what twists and turns the journey took. To marvel over our beautiful babies. To offer support as we figure out how to care for these helpless tiny beings that are so demanding and needy. To hold us as we hold our babies.

To hold us when we lose our babies. When our births require medical interventions that we didn’t want. To sit with us through the grief and as we process the trauma. To help us reweave the story in ways that move us through and help prevent us from getting stuck. To be with us when the postpartum journey is incredibly difficult for reasons we couldn’t have foreseen. 

To hold brave space as we become a new person, lose our identities, feel lost in a land with little sleep and huge hormonal shifts that makes very little sense. As we re-find ourselves again and come back even stronger than before.

Is there a time and place for giving birth completely alone? Absolutely. I loved my freebirth and many midwives wouldn’t have allowed my specific birth journey to freely play out the way it did (and that is the reason why I chose it - I am very free-spirited and don’t like restriction or the appearance of restriction). Many support options would have pushed me to do things I wouldn’t have wanted to do, made me feel powerless or passive (intentionally or by virtue of the “ritual” of expert vs. patient), or coerced me into giving up a journey that I really wanted to have. There was a point after my baby was born that I did want sisters around me though, and that’s often the part of freebirth that can be lacking.

And some of us are meant to go the road alone, either because of our own personal spiritual needs or because the support options around us are incredibly limited. 

But there could be a different culture. One that reminded women of their innate freedom and power. One that offered the healthy sisterhood we all crave. One that truly honored the biological blueprint of birth. One that allowed birth to be spiritually guided as much as it is physically guided. One that honored embodiment, self-responsibility, autonomy.

One that created a space where women remembered at last that they are inherently sovereign and trustworthy. And one that created a sacred and supportive community in which we all long to belong.

It starts with us, intentionally choosing our births and intentionally choosing how we support our sisters in births. It starts with stories, conversations over nourishing meals, healing our sister wounds, learning to love and hold space for others in ways that are about *them* and not us. 

We get free and heal together.