Recently I have been re-reading "Ina May's Guide To Childbirth" by Ina May Gaskin so that I can write a book critique on it. While reading I have come to realize that she has such great success with her midwifery career because she has discovered some basic, but unfortunately forgotten, principles of birth. However sometimes she attributes these things to the right source, God, and sometimes to the wrong source, evolution. At one place in the book she says that, " Your body is not a lemon. You are not a machine. The Creator is not a careless mechanic." I agree whole heartedly with that statement. A little later though she refers to "old" and "new" parts of the brain, and how we have "evolved" to not know how to give birth, and that if we let our primitive "old" brain work we would be much better off. Her conclusion that letting the brain stem work uninhibited to produce the hormones needed for a successful labor and delivery is correct, as is her conclusion that stimulating the neocortex inhibits labor. However I know that when God created us we had all of our brain.
Further on in the book she recalls the history of how we got to the modern idea of birth, and says that if we forget all of those ideas and just "let our monkey do it" we will be better off. I agree that we need to come to birth with the assumption that birth is a normal process, but we aren't descended from monkeys, so I would say that you just need to trust that God made your body just fine, and you need to let your body work the way it was created to work. Another thing she says is that "imagining yourself as a powerful mammal can help you feel empowered". I think it is helpful to look at animals and see that they give birth just fine, usually without any help at all, and say to yourself "if God designed animals to have babies just fine, then I know I can have a baby without unnecessary intervention." But to imagine that you, who are created in the image of God, is just an animal is, in my opinion, wrong.
I would recommend that instead of trying to let your monkey do it, or imagining you are an animal, you should memorize Isaiah 66:9 "Shall I bring to the birth, and not cause to bring forth? saith the LORD: Shall I cause to bring forth and shut the womb? saith thy God." I found that verse completely by accident one day, but I wrote it down because it is a great promise to remember when you are pregnant, or in labor. I remembered it earlier as I was trying to critically read through and find what I disagreed with, and why.
I realized then, that while she was right in stating that we need to get our thinking brain out of the way of our acting brain, attributing natural birth to a primitive evolutionary instinct that we need to tap into is wrong. What we need to tap into is the fact that God designed us to give birth and that we need to not try and "play god" with our unnecessary medical interventions.
This post is not to say that all medical advancements are bad. I've never said that, and I never will. It was simply an intriguing thought to me that you could have the correct knowledge and attribute it to the wrong source.
