by Hettie Brittz

One day when I have time (the delusional dream of all moms who have more than the national average of children per household) I want to research the ancient and modern ways women over the ages employed to bring about natural birth. How much control can we have over the outcome, even with all of our medical advances in hand? I want to see if our knowledge has ever really been the deciding factor. And once I have (probably biasedly) gathered my evidence, I want all mothers to admit that births are packages handed out by divine appointment rather than by just deserts.

I’ve always felt the pressure to do all the right things to make sure that I would be a natural mom in at least this important respect. Even twenty years ago the message was clear: You should give birth naturally. It’s the right way. Shockingly, the list of natural-birth boxes for an expectant mother to tick seems to have grown exponentially since I took prenatal classes. We had just two options: vaginal or cesarean section. You could be proud of yourself if you opted for the first. You were hailed as heroic and felt a sense of cave-woman pride. If you could forgo the spinal epidural or narcotics drip as well, you were even higher up the gauge of guts.

By my second pregnancy, I had gathered many opinions from Natural Mothers, whose circle I gained access to because my daughter had been born without the aid of drugs. They didn’t need to know that a phobia of needles was the reason and not my bravery or commitment to all things natural. These moms must have thought I was ready for the next level. I was encouraged to tear naturally rather than have an episiotomy. Tear naturally? So that my chances of being naturally incontinent would be higher? They were serious. Also, they suggested that a water birth was a much more natural experience. I should ask for that option and include family members. This was where I said something that got me dismissed permanently from this league of Natural Moms.

By my third pregnancy, I had figured out a few more helpful natural advantages. I was ready to imitate ancient nations in selected respects. I was not going to lie down like I did the first time but instead harness gravity and cooperate with nature by remaining upright until the baby threatened to fall out. Being the competitive type, I wanted to improve my record. The first birth took thirteen hours, the second seven. My goal was to more than halve that to three hours max. I walked briskly up and down the corridors with my doula on my heels. (Do I get one naturalness credit for having a doula?) She lifted my hospital gown every now and then for inspection until I literally had to be picked up onto the bed to give maybe three pushes in total. New record—check!

But some degrees of natural are just beyond me. I recently stumbled upon a blog with the title “I Regret Eating My Placenta.” Apart from being something I can imagine one regretting, it seemed worth reading just to answer the nagging question “What?!” To my surprise, one can eat it raw, cooked, or powdered and turned into capsules. Several celebrities have done it. It is supposed to have antidepressant and blood-health benefits. According to the article, it was the last stage of a truly natural birth. I had to concede that it doesn’t get more natural than that.

Does the extremely natural birth plan make one more natural than the mom who had everything planned but was woken up by her water breaking at twenty-seven weeks? Did this mom do something wrong? When we make moms responsible for shaping the outcome of their birth stories, we may be stepping onto a terrain where angels fear to tread. The holy space where God, not nurses and doctors, welcomes babies into the world and breathes into them their first breath, whether by a slap on the bottom, a lifting of their twiggy arms over their heads or a life-saving tube inserted very clinically into their tracheas, is a space where no mom is truly at the helm.
Is she unnatural if she has to have a cesarean section to save a baby who had the cord wrapped twice around his neck? Was I more natural than the mom whose baby was simply too bulky and had to have his shoulder broken, resulting in his collarbone sticking into his little lung, nearly killing him? Is this process not all beyond our control? Is it not just by grace that some of us have a so-called “natural birth” with no medical interventions?

There can even be grace in not putting your household through a natural home birth. I am convinced that if I had birthed any of my babies in a bath at home, there would have been casualties among the spectators. For example, my son can’t even look at raw tomatoes without being nauseated. Considering all that motherhood demands of a mother, is it so wrong if she opts for something as close to her definition of painless and as far from her idea of dramatic as possible? Does it make one a bad mother if she selects a cesarean because she hates surprises, fears an out-of-control process, and has a husband who works on an oil rig and desperately wants to plan his time onshore around the birth?

Every mom’s nature and life story call for a special birth. Should your nature call for all things natural and earthy, you should by all means go that route. If needles and white hospital sheets would spoil the day, then you should be free to find a way around those. The less we deny ourselves the choices that suit our personalities and resist the ways our bodies give birth, the better the memories of those important days when we enter into motherhood. I am convinced that the inclusion of a diversity of birth stories in the Bible, of which Jesus’s may have been the most uncomfortable, makes it clear that God does not prescribe some culturally dictated notion of the ideal birth. Neither should we.

Perhaps the truly natural mom is the one who accepts the birth package, however long she takes to come to terms with it (pun intended) and who finds a way through it all to thank God for the journey, whether she was an unplanned unnatural or a privileged natural on that pivotal day.