Minibabble: The way of the doula

Posted on by suki
The Babblery
The Babblery
Minibabble: The way of the doula
Loading
/

In praise of natural birth

In this mini version of the full episode, “Trusting our Survival Mechanisms with Doula Anne Wallen,” we focus on doula Anne Wallen’s trust in the natural process of birth. Anne points out that most practicing obstetricians have never seen a fully natural birth in a home or homelike setting, “and so they don’t know it’s trustworthy.”

 ”When you’re able to just gently allow your body to do its thing, your body will do it slowly and gently—the way that you would think that a baby would want to be born, and the way that you would think a woman would want to let a baby out of her body.” [Click for transcript]

Please leave feedback!

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

The Way of the Doula
In praise of natural birth

The Way of the Doula, in praise of natural birth

[00:00:25] Anne Wallen: I’ve watched women just breathe through their baby’s delivery. They didn’t push, they just breathed and their body did it for them. Your body will do it slowly and gently, the way that you would think that a baby would want to be born.

[00:00:40] Voiceover: This is your host, Suki Wessling. Does that description of birth sound unusual to you? Given my experiences, it certainly did to me, but let’s take a listen to my guest.

[00:00:54] Anne Wallen: Hi, I’m Anne Wallen and I am the director of Maternity Wise International. I am the mom of six and the grandmom of two, and I’ve been finding myself in maternal care roles for the past 30 plus years. This whole area of maternal care, it’s really my, my passion.

[00:01:12] Voiceover: I did a wide ranging interview with Anne on the Babblery, which you can listen to at B-A-B-B-L-E-R y.com. But in this short piece, I want to focus on one thing, the beauty of birth, as Anne sees it. You can hear it in my voice that in our interview I wanted to go into the negative, but kept pulling me back.

[00:01:33] I’m sort of a catastrophist by nature, so I’m like all the things that could go wrong, you know,

[00:01:39] Anne Wallen: But, but all the things that could go right, also.

[00:01:43] Voiceover: Ann describes the work of the doula this way.

[00:01:45] Anne Wallen: The word doula is actually Greek and it means servant, and it used to refer to the female servant in a household who would help the mother through pregnancy, childbirth, not necessarily in the role of a midwife, but also with, afterward, with breastfeeding, with childcare. Most people know doulas as being a, a labor support companion. And that is probably the majority of what people do when they call themselves a doula, is they’re educating people beforehand, before the birth. They’re with them physically and emotionally and mentally and and supporting them through the process of birth once labor starts.

[00:02:29] Voiceover: Ann is part of a movement that pushes back against the idea of the medicalized birth. That birth should be seen as a potential hazard, like an injury or an illness. And central to this movement is the idea that the human body still has everything it requires to give birth naturally in most circumstances, from physical structures to natural instincts.

[00:02:50] Anne Wallen: What I believe is that our bodies do have that innate wisdom in how to do this process. We have the organs, we have the muscles, we have the bony structure, everything that supports childbirth, right? Our, our pelvis, for example, is a three piece hinged unit, and it can move and change shape and enlarge and allow the baby to move through it.

[00:03:14] Our muscles, our, our brain chemistry that promotes oxytocin, that creates the contractions. You know, all of these things know how to work together.

[00:03:24] Just like our breathing, we know how to breathe. We don’t have to think about it. We don’t usually need assistance with it unless there’s something going wrong. Our digestion, like our, we don’t have to think about our digestion. We just eat our food and our digestion does its thing and we go to the bathroom and, you know, hunky dory.

[00:03:41] Voiceover: Ann doesn’t sugarcoat the risks of human pregnancy, but she also points out that we heighten the risks with our modern medicalized birth system.

[00:03:49] Anne Wallen: Sometimes our, our biological functioning doesn’t go perfectly. One of the requirements for these functions to work right, is the ability to be vulnerable and the ability to feel safe. So I like to explain it to my students. It’s kind of like orgasm. In fact, it’s very, very much like orgasm because the same chemicals are at play. And if you’re in a room with strangers with bright lights shining down on you and it’s a fam unfamiliar space, um, you might not feel comfortable having an orgasm. It might be very, very difficult. You can force it maybe, right. But it’s a, it’s not just a biological process in our body, it’s also in our mind. It’s in our brain. And so if we don’t feel safe and comfortable to open up the sphincter of our cervix, right, and we don’t have control over that, this is an involuntary process, right?

[00:04:47] But the whole birth process, the pregnancy process, all of this has these really amazing, I call ’em survival mechanisms. And when I’m training, you’ll, my students probably get tired of me, but I sing song it, I’m always like, here’s another survival mechanism I love them. There’s so many of them.

[00:05:07] Voiceover: Ann says that just like an animal’s body, human bodies shut down if they feel unsafe. She talked about how cat’s bodies show the same behavior as humans if they feel threatened.

[00:05:18] Anne Wallen: Let’s say there’s, you know, a mama kitten having her babies, and then there’s some kind of threat that comes along. That mama will stop having her babies. She’ll pick up the ones she’s given birth to bring them to a safe place. And once she’s got everybody in the new nest, right, she continues to have the rest of the babies.

[00:05:36] And so this is a, a survival mechanism that we love to appreciate. But it also is hard to get around if you are having to go to a place that doesn’t feel safe to you, doesn’t feel familiar to you having to be around people who don’t, you know, they’re not familiar. Or sometimes it’s the first time you’ve ever met this person and then they’re supposed to be up in your junk? No way. Like you can’t feel good about that, right? Even if you know with your mind that this is quote unquote normal, which it’s not normal at all, but we’ve, we’ve created this expectation of it being normal. Now,

[00:06:17] Voiceover: Ann Wallen says that the medicalization of birth, which is still largely embraced in the United States, is the wrong way to look at it. Instead, we should use the medical model only for births that need it.

[00:06:29] Anne Wallen: Birth has always, for the majority always happened in homes. When there was trouble, they went to a place that could provide the skills and the tech and the whatever necessary. But for the most part, you know, if, if left undisturbed birth will happen, just like any other natural biological process, and when there’s issues, thank goodness we have the ability to help those who need a little extra help.

[00:06:58] Voiceover: For listeners who still resist and want to believe that humans are somehow different from other species when it comes to birth, anne gives this striking example.

[00:07:07] Anne Wallen: You know, women in a coma have given birth and they’re not consciously pushing. Nobody’s in there cheering them on. Baby just comes out and they figure it out eventually. But, and this has happened more than once, you know, so the body knows what to do. There’s something called a, a fetal ejection reflex. And the body will do it.

[00:07:23] You, you have all these contractions, contract, contract, contract, and those are all to open the cervix. And then once you get completely dilated and the cervix is around the biggest part of the baby’s head, and there’s really no more stretching that it needs to do, now the uterine muscles kind of gather up behind the baby. They kind of reorganize themselves. And you start to have this ejection reflex where the, the body actually pushes the baby down and out.

[00:07:51] And if you can just allow it to happen. I’ve watched women just breathe through their baby’s delivery. They didn’t push, they just breathed and their body did it for them. And when you’re able to just gently allow your body to do its thing, you don’t tear, you don’t have pelvic floor injuries as often, you don’t, you know, your body will do it slowly and gently, the way that you would think that a baby would want to be born, right? And the way that you would think a woman would want to let a baby out of her body, right?

[00:08:25] Voiceover: Anne points out that the American way of birth hasn’t arisen from practices that lead to better outcomes. In fact, the US has by far the highest maternal mortality rate of similar countries.

[00:08:36] Anne Wallen: Oftentimes, because obstetricians have the highest number of potential lawsuits and, and everything else, they are taught to be really fearful of birth. They’re taught to manage problems before they happen. and all of these things are, are probably, they’re unintentionally causing issues. No OB wakes up in the morning and says, I want to ruin someone’s birth today. Like, whose birth can I wreck today? Like, that’s just not how they got into this job, right? But sometimes the way they were taught. Many obs have never seen a natural or physiologically uninterrupted unhindered birth. And so they don’t know that it’s trustworthy.

[00:09:23] Voiceover: American public health is trying to fix our problems by piling more medicine on top of what’s already there. But Anne points out that we could just move to models already proven to work.

[00:09:34] Anne Wallen: Talking from a public health standpoint, we need to look at what the rest of the world is doing. It can’t just be, you know, America needs to do this or America needs to do that, or America’s better at this or that.

[00:09:46] Most of the countries that have the best rates, they have midwife led care, and a larger percentage of births that are happening at home. We need to get back to understanding women’s physiology. And I think that that also comes from, you know, in a, in a hospital setting, there’s a lot of male or masculine solutions or processes put on a feminine process, which doesn’t work.

[00:10:15] It’s a, it’s a, it’s a, you know, circle trying to fit or in a square peg or a square peg in a square, in a circle, whatever. it’s just not compatible with how women, physiologically and psychologically, need to go through the process.

[00:10:29] Voiceover: Anne came to this understanding of women’s health gradually. Her own first three births were in hospitals, but from early in life she was primed to believe that women need to look back at the types of care that served us and our bodies better.

[00:10:44] Anne Wallen: I was raised by women who, I don’t want to call them feminists because I don’t think any of them would consider themselves feminists, but they really understood, nature and just mothering and trusted and believed in the body.

[00:11:00] Voiceover: To those of you who think you might someday give birth or if you are pregnant now Anne has some strong words of encouragement.

[00:11:08] Anne Wallen: Get to know what your yeses and nos are, what you want for your birth experience. And then don’t be afraid to hold those lines. Don’t be afraid to say, doesn’t feel right to me. Not gonna agree to that, right? And then expect your partner or whoever it is that’s there with you supporting you, expect them to back you up. And if that person is fighting you all along the way, they should not be at your birth. You should only have people who are willing to respect you, to support and protect your bodily autonomy, your choices. Only those people should be in the room.

[00:12:02] Voiceover: Thanks to Anne Wallen of Maternity Wise for speaking with me about her life and work. Find more information in the show notes @babblery.com. I’m your host, Suki Wessling. Thanks for listening.

Powered by