The Myth of Normal 130

For me, the ideal birth situation is a woman alone in a silent room, lights dimmed, with a midwife calmly sitting with her and knitting,” Michel Odent told me—a wry but astute comment on the harmful effect of bright lights, noisy machines, and bustling, hectoring medical personnel on the labor process. This brings us back to the discussion of “inherent expectation” in our chapter on human nature. We, like all organisms, arrive on the scene with the anticipation that life will unfold within certain parameters. Being the adaptable creatures we are, we can endure less than the best—at a cost. “The baby’s experiences during a birth without trauma have got to be those, and only those, which correspond to his and his mother’s ancient expectations,” writes Jean Liedloff in her study of an Aboriginal forest society. Whereas other mammals seek dark, quiet, solitary places for birth, she points out, we invite birth trauma with “the use of steel instruments, bright lights, rubber gloves, the smells of antiseptic and anesthetic, loud voices or the sounds of machinery.”[13] Mothers feel it, even if no one else sees anything out of the ordinary. I still remember my wife whispering to me during our first birth, regarding the nurse who kept haranguing her to “Push, girl, push,” to “Please tell that woman to shut up.”[*] A person’s body seizes up in the absence of safety and emotional connection, especially under the effect of sensitizing hormones. Oblivious to the woman’s needs for silence, safety, and attunement, hospitals create a self-perpetuating cycle, instigating many of the labor complications they then must intervene to resolve. Ilana Stanger-Ross summed up traditional wisdom and modern science in words that, in a saner system, wouldn’t even need to be said: “We need to approach someone in labor as a full person who is experiencing a sacred life passage,” she told me. “They’re not a sick patient. They are a person in labor —which is a very normal thing to be