International Women's Day---Guest Post: Wake Up Campaign

Today is International Women’s Day, an occasion to celebrate women and girls’ remarkable potential, inherent worth and vital contributions to our communities. It’s also a day to recognize that millions of women and girls still confront threats to their safety, their health, their livelihoods and their dignity - and to advocate for solutions that can improve their lives.

Are you concerned with these issues? Then join the International Rescue Committee (IRC)’s Wake Up campaign. At rescue.org/wakeup, you can read stories of real women facing crisis – like Fatuma, whose daughter was assaulted on the daily trek for clean water in Somalia; Francine, who is working to overcome the wounds of sexual slavery in Congo; and Angele, a Cameroonian asylee who fled political turmoil in her home country and is slowly rebuilding her life in the United States. You can sign a pledge affirming your support for women and girls like these all over the world who are fighting for survival and struggling to endure. When you do, you’ll join the ranks of such notables as IRC Voice and “The Walking Dead” star Sarah Wayne Callies and actresses Téa Leoni, Alyssa Milano and Morena Baccarin. And you can use the tools in the IRC’s handy social action kit to share the pledge and raise awareness about what can be done to help – which makes you a part of the solution.

The IRC works to protect and empower women and girls in more than 40 countries and 22 U.S. cities, from Burundi to Baltimore. We’re joining with them on this special day, to take a stand for women and girls. We hope that you will, too. Sign the Wake Up pledge and pass it on!
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Article provided by Ruth Fertig of International Rescue Committee

In photo:
Lay Htoo, 20, looks at her newborn daughter Di Lay, born a few hours earlier in Tham Hin refugee camp’s maternity ward. Each year, 15 midwives trained by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) examine and support hundreds of women and children in the camp, which is near the Thailand-Myanmar border. (Photo: Peter Biro/IRC).

Guest Post: American Childbirth Culture

I am pleased to have a guest post today from blogger and activist, Anna Guthrie. (I am accepting guest posts for this blog while I'm on maternity leave--feel free to email me with your ideas!)

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American Childbirth Culture

A couple of months ago, Molly posted some great thoughts about “why” all of this (childbirth/midwifery education) is so important, especially considering that so many people don’t seem to want to change the way things are. That’s the number one question I’ve pondered in all my years of “activism” for normal, natural, or “physiological” birth (as I’ve heard it called most recently).

The next most interesting question I’ve heard is one that has been asked me by many women: “What is so wrong with the [medically dominated] way I gave birth?” The first couple of times, it took me by surprise since I had never said that nor was meaning to be offensive at all in expressing my opinion. I also had no good answer-I’d think, what’s wrong with what’s considered “normal” childbirth in our country? Everything! Where should I start?! But, then I realized that these women were not just asking a question, they were on the defensive…immediately, without even hearing a word I said and they were the ones who had asked me. They had initiated the conversation about birth with a sincere desire to know what I had to say, but couldn’t get beyond their own births. That’s when it hit me…

This is all about our American childbirth culture-it goes deeper than all the statistics and conferences and symposiums. (Although I realize that those things are essential, and thank goodness there are so many people out there doing their part to create a change). I realized I’m interested in the psychological aspect of a woman’s relationship to birth, how the dynamics of our cultural history has shaped that, and how that can be changed.

The medical world that dominates childbirth in this country as well as the social and cultural environment we are born into teaches us from a young age to trust it without question. I just saw a billboard on the side of the freeway in Emeryville, CA (the first of many similar ones now being used by different hospitals). It features a picture of a happy, carefree woman, dressed in a flowing blouse, half-reclined in the grass so that her pregnant belly is obvious, and smiling at her little toddler on her lap. It reads, "Kaiser Permanente...DELIVERS". I couldn’t believe it-anyway, I thought MOTHERS delivered babies J-it’s almost as if they are purposely launching a counter-attack on any recent progress in childbirth education, natural birth, home birth, and midwifery! This is the hold the medical world has on our society. There is so much damage to undo here that it's hard to know where to start.

A woman’s birth is so personal to her and that’s one thing that drives many women to question and reject the status quo; but, it also works against those efforts. So many women give birth without ever hearing anything about this and they never have the opportunity to make a different choice. So that personal relationship to their birth is so sensitive-even more than they comprehend-that they don’t want to know what they are missing, or missed. So, we need to come full circle: instead of girls growing up within this false belief system of “medicalized” childbirth and then trying to shift their paradigm as adults, we need to work to change our culture from the ground up. Girls (and boys) should grow up understanding birth from the healthy perspective of natural, physiological birth being the ideal and medical intervention as merely the benefit of living in the 21st century and out of necessity or personal choice. So, that brings us back to the ultimate question, “why?”… So that the joy of childbirth can be fully experienced by everyone in our society because it is naturally woven into the fabric of our culture.

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Anna Guthrie is a mother of three, homemaker, artist, and childbirth education activist. http://americanchildbirthculture.blogspot.com/