Читать книгу Stand and Deliver!: And other Brilliant Ways to Give Birth - Emma Mahony - Страница 20

While my first labour might have got going quicker with a little more intimacy, some of our friends across the pond have been using sex in birth since the 1960s. Ina May Gaskin wrote the first edition of Spiritual Midwifery in 1975, and says in the Introduction, ‘Generally speaking, the more comfortable a woman is living in her body, the more easily she gives birth.’ She was writing at a time of hippie idealism, when a group of around 300 people had come together in San Francisco to tour the country in camper vans until founding a commune in rural Tennessee called The Farm.

Ina May, after attending the births of women on the road trip, went on to qualify as a midwife and keep records that prove that intense emotional support and trust in the physiological process produce great birth outcomes. There were 11 births on the road before they settled in Tennessee, and today, after 2,028 pregnancies, 95 per cent completed at home and only a 1.4 per cent Caesarean rate (compare that with 30 per cent in some British hospitals), The Farm’s statistics must beat any other birth centre in the world. Here are a few of the more experimental lessons they learned on the way.