I sat in a café one day drinking coffee and browsing on the Internet when I overheard a conversation at the table next to me.

"I was hanging onto the hospital bed side rail, high as a kite, asking: Is the baby here yet?" She and her friends laughed together.

Another one of the women said, "My C-section didn't hurt the baby or me.  I just didn't like how long it took me to walk around and get back to work."

One woman who was newly pregnant asked, "When I'm at the hospital, will I be able to have you there? After all, I would like to have you my close friend there.

The first lady replied, "Why? What could I do for you? They will do everything.  You'll have a really nice room and a chef to cook for you."

My heart was broken.  I know I was listening to this conversation from the point of view of a midwife with more than 35 years under my belt.  That's a lot of view to have.  I couldn't help feeling sad, not only for this new mother-to-be, but also her associates.  What kind of world have we devolved so that those horrific birth experiences separate us from the beauty of the birthing event and leave us alone without personal support.  Regretfully this has become not only normal but widely accepted.  The friend lost out on the whole invitation and the honor of participating in the birthing event and the pregnant lady lost a friendly support person to be with her, an instinctive desire.

As I continued to listen, I realized that they were complaining about their births and about the things that they did not like as women have one for millennia.  This is, in and of itself, perfectly natural, but usually there is another side to it that should be shared: the pure peace and joy that comes from a new bundle of love at the end of their ordeal.  Obviously, these women didn't seem to know how to connect with those parts of their experiences.  It was because of what my eyes have seen that I wanted to share some thought with them.

On the tail end of sharing this tidbit of pain, they immediately rationalized their experiences as this is just the way things are, and there really is no other way to be. It was expected.  The most tragic part was when I realized that a fourth party was a young girl who was perhaps only 16 years old.  How were her expectations about the process of pregnancy and birth going to be shaped and molded by this conversation and others like it? Their attitude of opting for a hospital birth to avoid the complications that might happen made me wonder how any of them could truly claim to know anything about birth including the older woman who, it turned out, was a labor-and-delivery nurse herself.  Astonishing!  Here was this young girl listening to a nurse, a mother, and a friend all talking about how their birth was so bad, how it was just the way it was, and they didn't like it.  They also felt they couldn't change it.  Again, I literally felt pain and heartache because the comparison of the many births in my practice their experience was hugely different.  I almost never experienced what they did, and they never could have a clue of how good it has been for my Mothers and families.

I really started thinking about how as a society we have gotten to the point where the traditions and the wisdom of thousands of generations have been lost in only a single century and , moreover, what the real nature of these negative changes are.

In an over-medicated interfered-with-birth, we are virtuously practicing a loss of faith in ourselves, in our bodies and in our community.  The idea of a woman being left completely alone to labor with out any of the love and support that she needs, and to be surrounded only by strangers and machine, leaves one with a terrible void.  More than that, to imagine an experience as intense as birth being so clouded that a woman is not even able to determine if the baby is out yet is horrifying to me, yet she was making a joke out it.

Hearing endless excuses for C-sections because her pelvis is too small, or her boyfriend is Latin so the child is likely to have a massive head, or the induction is taking too long takes me from sadness into anger.  How could we? What have we done? What has happened to the joy of being human in a human body?

Anger is rooted in fear.  My anger stems from the fear that while we as midwives are striving to educate the public and bring back the beauty of what our bodies naturally do, there are hundreds of louder voices programming generation after generation to bring what is natural to a far more destructive fear.  Yes, a fear that, after all, has been motivated by a multiple of transitions into medicated birthing system.  Between mother and child has come the doctor, the nurse, the epidural, the episiotomy, the electronic fetal monitor, the intravenous saline line, the forceps, the induction, the caesarian section and the NICU.  Eventually, a mother gets to hold her child, but only after it has been suctioned, weighted, poke, prodded, injected, smeared and handled by a half a dozen people who are not the mother.  And why? Because something might happen if we don't.

Any obstetrician will give you a brilliant laundry list of those something's.  (1) there could be a breech presentation or a cord entanglement, (2) there could be an obstruction in the nasal cavity or some kind of abnormality in the child's development, (3) it could be a slow starter, not breathing on its own for a full minute or not responding up to optimum standards, (4) the mother could have had an unknown infection, or (5) maybe there's something invisible and ambiguous that might escape attention, and then something might happen.

Alas! If we didn't do these procedures, of course, the following something might happen, could be: (1) a mother might actually have a natural and personally transformative experience through the very ancient process of delivering a child without interference, (2) she maybe attended by love and faith by an experienced midwife or doctor and, (3) by an informed, prepared, educated and supported mother.  To think sometimes of all that happens to a woman only to end up with a C-section anyway really makes wee wonder how she lives thru it, what the body takes and then to end up with that section enrages me.  Why lie to her and her family and then run her of the rest of the process by calling time out/ over on her and then C-section her.

As I listened to those women, I wanted to involve myself in their conversation.  To seize that moment to educated them on the vague possibility of another way of doing things; but I would be just an interloper and would surely be shouldered out quickly as it has happened to me before.  Maybe it really isn't my place to interfere, but what if I had

Been successful? What if I had taken the chance to share something so simple, yet so profound that they might have even just considered that there was a different way that the something might happen, just didn't need all the extra machines and fearful people.  As a midwife I have not lived in such a life of fear.  I have never had a mother pass or a baby pass.  The transport rate has been very, very low in my office as well as it has been for many other midwives.  One stretch of 7 years went by in which I had only 1 transport that became a real medical need calling for a section, cpd.

I do know, having had many years of so much good news to share, that I was disturbed by hearing these women talk, and the way it effected that young girl.  It really disturbed me, and if I could have I would have attempted to educate the 16 year old.  I was so disturbed sitting in that resturant; it has prompted me to write this article.  Witnessing that scene stayed with me for days.

I actually was distraught over it.  They had no idea what damage had been done to themselves or what damage they were doing to the young woman.  What could they have been thinking? What if that your school girl would have heard me and kept that in her mind?

In natural births, many complications are seen hours, weeks or months before the delivery.  We generally know how to cope with them or correct them before labor and delivery and are completely trained to do so.  We midwives do not have the luxury of whole wing of NICU and legions of trained professionals to handle the one-in-a-hundred or even one-in-a-thousand chance of complication that may or may not require intervention.  We manage to have a better infant and maternal mortality rate than most hospitals.  We know that a baby failing to thrive or stabilize will truly take a turn for the worse if separate from warmth and love, voice and heartbeat of the mother.  We know that a nuchal cord can be gently slipped over a baby's head, often while still in the birth canal and is not a serious complication as used against a woman, the what if.  We know that there is nothing that modern science has come up with to replace the bond that occurs at that instant of entrance into our world-though it is still trying.

The real tragedy of mediated births is when children are removed from their mothers, especially in those first fleeting moments of life in the open.  The bond is not shattered but it is called into question in the primal self.  It can lead to physical and emotional complications in the first year, during the toddling phases, and throughout life, because there is a tiny little seed of distrust in the first and most important relationship in any lifetime.  When we allow ourselves to mediate birth to this point, we are creating a gap within ourselves as society and a species that become wider and wider with each passing generation, and a violation of pure and innocent trust inherited additionally in every birth.  That gap could well be the cornerstone of the disease of greed and fear that our world seemingly thrives on these days.  The worst of it is that women give away their birth to fear and surrender to the system in hopes that they will not feel the process.  Someone told them it will hurt, someone said, "it's just they way it is"

These ladies paid their restaurant tab and wandered out, still chattering among themselves.  I was left with a bowl of sadness.  The comparison of what I have seen and know and what they have seen and know.

Was that a missed opportunity, or was it really none of my business to get involved?  Yes, yes it was I would say.  The truth outside of the modern medical policy is so much more real, but it is not something that can be brought to overwhelming public awareness overnight.  When will the foundation of trust in medicine adjusted to realize that hospitals exist for the sick and endangered-not the healthy and the normal.  There are no public service ad campaigns or commercials during prime-time television that can change the opinion of society as a whole.  Perhaps if we approached it one person at a time, or left a silent business card in surreptitious places, declaring that midwives, are the guardians of mothers and children, we might stand a chance.  If enough one person at a time conversations took place, or maybe if billboards and television spots were eventually seen, or if I could write more articles about, Birth as a natural process attitudes might improve in the 21^st century.

As I said at the 2010 CIM's conference We Must keep Going.

In the meantime, we are in the field, elated at the clients who come to us pre-educated, Or just ready to be coached and guided toward trust in themselves and their bodies.  We wait as patiently as we can for the other women who do not yet know that they were designed to have babies to wake up and ask is there another way.  It does happen instinctually if not interrupted or did fear take over? Does a birth have to cost thousands upon thousands of dollars? Is this uncomfortable elastic strap really necessary for the entire event? How did our ancestors survive to grow the human race to this size without intravenous lines and saline drips and being lied to as well as omitting information to keep you uniformed? We wait, and we teach whenever possible.  It can make us sad, this waiting, but we also have faith that in the end, future mothers will wake up, and we will be ready to help.

In closing, allow me some personal thoughts.

I am so glad that I had my three children with midwives and I am even more pleased that both my girls have had beautiful special underwater births as well.  It was not only my privilege to be there but also to attend some other 1,600 births, witnessing that first breath in a kind and gentler way.  My eyes have seen the faces of mothers and fathers in that first second or two.  There is no greater joy or experience.