Valerie Hall, Author at Generations Home birth

Bountiful

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Fertile, fecund, abundant, ripe, productive…you could talk about your garden with these words. You could talk about the earth. You could describe a pregnant woman this way, and the poets have done so through the ages.

Benjamin Franklin said “A ship in sail and a big-bellied woman are the two
handsomest things that can be seen commonly.” Both are harbingers of rich cargo, of voyages into port filled with precious things. This has been the common viewpoint of most people in most ages of history. Prehistoric figurines witness to the worship of fertility goddesses with ripe bellies and full breasts.

Even now, when the fertility rate is well below replacement in all developed countries, women still celebrate their pregnancies by taking progressive “bump pictures” or having special photo shoots featuring their rounded bellies.

Our society is strangely contradictory about this. On the one hand, we encourage women to spend their most fertile years attending college and starting careers. Most of our female role models are fashionably slim. We talk as though thinness is the ultimate virtue, even throughout pregnancies. “You hardly look pregnant at all. From the back you’d never know” is considered a compliment. “Getting my body back” is the grimly determined goal of many new mothers.

Grandmothers are older now. Their daughters put off having babies until their thirties, so Nana is closer to 60 instead of 40 when the baby finally comes. That leaves a lot of menopausal years without the traditional role coming into play. Work (let’s be honest – most women have jobs, not careers, just like most men) must fill the hunger for meaning in women’s lives.

And what about our conflicted feelings about conception? We spend billions on birth control and billions on infertility treatments. The two things are not unrelated; many of the most popular birth control methods have side effects that include subfertility after discontinuing.

Of course, the causes of infertility are myriad. For one thing, male fertility is declining sharply. Estimates are that European and North American men have only 50% of the sperm counts that were common 30 years ago, and sperm quality has deteriorated too. The reasons for this are mostly unknown. The Pill, heralded as the key to women’s autonomy, is now coming under scrutiny because of new understanding about its effect on general health and well-being.

Being Born Is Important

Carl Sandburg

Being born is important.

You who have stood at the bedposts

and seen a mother on her high harvest day,

the day of the most golden of harvest moons for her.

You who have seen the new wet child dried behind the ears,

swaddled in soft fresh garments,

pursing its lips and sending a groping mouth

toward the nipples where white milk is ready

You who have seen this love’s payday of wild toil and sweet agonizing

You know being born is important.

You know nothing else was ever so important to you.

You understand the payday of love is so old,

So involved, so traced with the circles of the moon,

So cunning with the secrets of the salts of the blood

It must be older than the moon, older than the salt.

While some women are cheering loudly about the ability to abort babies right up to full-term, others are mourning in silent grief over miscarriages or stillbirths.

I lost a baby in the second trimester and suffered a hemorrhage with the loss. For the 3 days between the time I knew my baby was gone and the actual birth, my feelings were indescribable. My womb, a safe warm nurturing place for new life had become a tomb. I was a tomb. From being fertile and abundant I had become a desert. After the hemorrhage it took over a month before I had any energy at all, but the emotional dead weight was far worse.

My next pregnancy was shadowed and haunted, even though it went well. I have known women to bury their late miscarried babies and stillborn babies in softly lined caskets as though to cradle them in every way left. I have known other women to express relief and exultation at being able to abort a baby of the same gestational age.

This blog is not about abortion or voluntary infertility. There are many, many voices to speak for and against these. Information is easy to find and opinion even easier.

As a midwife and gardener, I want to talk about Life-bearing. The fusion of male and female, seed and soil, yin and yang in the dance of begetting and conceiving, gestation and bringing forth has been the rhythm of life since the Dawn Time. It never grows stale.

Honor the Power of Life-bearing

Women have exercised tremendous power since the beginnings of humankind. This
statement may seem counterintuitive today, although it was certainly recognized as truth in
earlier times. The power to receive a seed, a sperm cell, combine it with an egg cell and nurture
its development in darkness until it is ready to emerge is the power of the earth itself, and most cultures have recognized the earth as a female entity. No human being has ever entered into this life except through the body of a woman. Can there be a greater power than this.

To bear a child, to start a human being on the path of life is an act of vision and hope. It is true that it is not always a willing and happy act. Not every child is nurtured in hope and love. Even so the child emerges and is a miracle. The potential is endless, and there is hope in that.

Whether any child lives one minute or 100 years, life has had its chance. The unique value of every human being does not consist in length of life or in wealth or education or health. Each child is a truly new thing, a combination of heredity and environment that can never be duplicated or predicted. Each life is a gift given by a mother, a Lifebearer. Even if she does not raise the child herself, the gift has been given.

I am writing this blog because I want to celebrate this Lifebearing faculty. I stand in awe
of the power I have witnessed in women. This is the “power to” which comes from personal
sacrifice, not the “power over” which is perhaps the more popular and sought-after capacity. The sacrificial, heroic Life-bearing capacity is absolutely essential to our continuation as a species, yet for some reason it is often denigrated in comparison to the other type of power,
the coercive or administrative.

Lifebearers deserve to be celebrated, honored, sustained. As a midwife, I am privileged
to be a watcher at the gates of life. Mothers are the gates. Their birthright is joy and awe.