Winner For Women’s Health at the 2012 Los Angeles Film Festival

Birth Story: Ina May Gaskin and The Farm Midwives. (Courtesy Birth Story)

LOS ANGELES—There may be something to be said for doing things the old-fashioned way, the way nature might have intended. In Birth Story: Ina May Gaskin and The Farm Midwives, Ina May Gaskin and other midwives show a number of natural births, just as they took place: right there with husbands, children, friends, and the mother ready to give birth.

The film took home the Documentary Film Award on June 14 at the Los Angeles Film Festival.

It shows it all—no drapes, nothing blocking the camera. Yet, you’re caught up in this event, for what it is: a natural rite of passage that has been taking place for millennia. These births were assisted or included the presence of one or more a trained midwives as a new life entered the family. Many in the audience nodded, and some said watching it was a “sacred” experience.

Ina May Gaskin is a pioneering midwife, and the founder and director of the Farm Midwifery Center in Tennessee. She has assisted in over 1,200 natural deliveries in her 40-plus year career. Her demeanor and approach is pragmatic and down-to-earth.

The documentary was co-directed by Sara Lamm (Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soapbox) and Mary Wigmore. The movie starts with a travelogue of family film footage of those families that decided to leave the modernized California landscape in 1971 and go to the Tennessee countryside to start a new life.

Drawing upon her years of experience, Gaskin’s passion is to “share the benefits and joys of natural childbirth by showing women how to trust in the ancient wisdom of their bodies for a healthy and fulfilling birthing experience. Based on the female-centered Midwifery Model of Care gives expectant mothers comprehensive information on everything from the all-important mind-body connection to how to give birth without technological intervention,” she writes in her book Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth.

The Farm

Gaskin and her husband Stephen and other families founded the famous community known as The Farm in Summertown, Tenn., in 1971. The Farm is an intentional community of families and friends who left California to live on three square miles in Tennessee. The Farm started with the goal of “establishing a strongly cohesive, outwardly-directed community. We want, by action and example, to have a positive effect on the world,” states their website.

Over the last 40-plus years, The Farm has become well known for many natural things: healthy vegetarian cuisine, assisting native cultures, alternative technologies, and of course, natural childbirth and midwifery.

Gaskin said, “We choose to live in a community where we share our lives and fortunes, good times and hard times. We feel that we can be stronger and more useful together than we could be separately.”

Gaskin and The Farm midwives established one of the first non-hospital birth centers in the United States. The Farm’s model is based on recommendations of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Unlike many hospital deliveries, family members and friends commonly attend and take an active role in the birth.

Gaskin travels internationally to network and lecture with other midwives and organizations. She has lectured at midwifery conferences and medical schools all over the world. She is also the author of Spiritual Midwifery, the classic book on homebirth, now in its fourth edition.

What’s Wrong with Gravity?

Explaining the origins of the modern birth position, U.K. Dr. Françoise Barbara Freedman, a medical anthropologist teaching at Cambridge University and midwife, said, “It was French King Louis XIV who insisted on watching his mistress Madame de Maintenon give birth, and the royal doctor had her lie down on the bed rather than sit in the birthing chair so that the king could see his child being born. This unfortunately coincided with the invention of forceps by the Chamberlain brothers in England, so that it became officially the lithotomy position, what a cascade of horrors…”

Forceps are seldom used anymore, because its use can cause spinal neck misalignment or tissue damage to both mother and baby. However, women are still required to lay flat on their backs, and sometimes, even worse, with their feet in stirrups. This inhibits dilation and the woman’s ability to bend over and apply pressure with her contractions to facilitate a shorter natural delivery. The current science hasn’t changed since Louis XIV—350 years ago!

After 350 years, the question should be asked, “Can’t a team consisting of a medical equipment designer, an OBGYN, and an experienced midwife design a birthing chair that would also allow a reclining table feature for the convenience of treatment and accessibility, should a medical intervention be necessary?”

Child Birth and Medical Intervention

Medical intervention is very important with high-risk births or unexpected complications during and after birth. However, some are claiming that medical intervention is utilized when not medically required.

Another intervention is separating the baby from its mother at birth, not letting her and the baby bond for even a minute. This may have consequences for bonding later on.

Medical intervention is far less frequent in natural home births when compared to the hospital setting. The episiotomy (an incision made to ease the exit of the baby) rate was 2.1 percent for the home-birth group, compared with 33 percent for hospital births, and labor was induced in only 9.6 percent of home births, compared to 21 percent of hospital births. Medical intervention is where most problems occur.

• Birth Trauma Canada

  deliberately don’t state is that these are planned vaginal deliveries (PVD) that ended in emergency cesareans

  This is natural birth propaganda at its worst. I hardly know where to start in
  deconstructing the inflammatory statements and wild inaccuracies. 1200 births over 40+ years is an extremely small
  sample size to be making any credible pronouncements. How many of these births were to first time
  mothers? How many were having 2nd
  or subsequent children. It is first time
  mothers with the highest rate of morbidity and mortality. After the damage done by their first there is
  little or no resistance left with the others.
  This is why subsequent births are ‘easier’ but why would women want the
  damage with the first?

  They infer that the episiotomy rate is lower with ‘natural’ births but
  refuse to state that the rate of spontaneous lacerations is extremely high (as
  it is in hospital births, particularly in first time mothers). Labour isn’t induced in home births but
  labour can go on for days. Is being in
  excruciating agony for days really what she thinks the majority of women want? The life-time damage to women from vaginal
  births – urinary and anal incontinence,
  pelvic organ prolapse, sexual dysfunction, to name a few – is completely
  ignored. Women don’t realize the long
  term problems a vaginal birth can cause.
  It is delusional to think that ‘natural’ is always best. I like fuzzy puppies and rainbows as much as
  the next person but let’s consider all the things that are natural that aren’t
  good for us. Death, malaria, tsunamis, radon gas, those big
  snakes that squish you until you are dead and then eat you. It is a long list and you get my drift. The fact is that nature can be cruel, unfair
  and tragic. Millions of women have died
  in ‘natural’ childbirth, many millions more have been maimed and for centuries
  this has happened with midwifes, long before hospitals and physicians were
  around to blame. 97% of births do not
  happen ‘fine on its own when left alone’.
  And when does a room full of people ‘fully participating’ count as being
  left alone? The idea of that gives many
  women the creeps.

  The mind-boggling inaccuracies about cesareans are staggering. They state that ‘43% of women who have a
  cesarean with their first child do not have another one’. What they deliberately don’t state is that
  these are planned vaginal deliveries (PCD) that ended in emergency
  cesareans. They are not planned
  cesareans (PCD). It is planned cesareans
  that the majority of women in Brazil have because
  they want them. PCD are considerably
  safer than PVD. Those Brazilian women
  too scared to look are right. Most
  planned vaginal births, particularly to first time mothers, are
  terrifying. It is women who have had
  emergency cesareans as the end result of a failed vaginal birth with the
  highest levels of post-traumatic stress, followed closely by those who have had
  assisted vaginal births with forceps and vacuum extractors and spontaneous
  vaginal births, particularly those where they were denied effective pain relief
  – another natural birth must. I have yet
  to hear one story of a woman who wanted a planned cesarean, where that right
  was respected, who had post-traumatic stress symptoms. And I have listened to thousands of negative
  childbirth stories since 1998.

  Planned cesareans do not happen ‘usually at 38 weeks’. They happen at term at 39+ weeks unless there
  are maternal or neonatal complications that make an earlier delivery the difference
  between living and dying, in which case a PCD is the safest birth because time
  is of the essence. The WHO (finally,
  after being asked to come up with credible evidence they could not supply) admitted
  in 2009 that there acceptable cesarean rate figure of 10-15% was bogus. I have no idea where these natural birth
  crusaders get a medically acceptable figure of 5%.

  If Ina May Gaskin and her followers really want
  to humanize birth they need to stop thinking that suffering and morbidity are
  normal when they happen to women. One
  must hate women very much to think that way.
  There would be justifiable outrage if the same attitude applied to men
  and children.