Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (97 page)

Through the years I’ve worked with birth mothers as well as adoptive mothers, and I appreciate both ends of this relationship. Both giving up a baby for adoption and adopting one have consequences and put all the parties involved on an emotional roller coaster. In the past, adoption agencies operated under the illusions of secrecy and denial. Now, through the efforts of birth mothers and adopted children alike, natural parents and their adopted-out babies are finding one another, sometimes with joyous results but sometimes also with great disappointment. Nevertheless, adoption is an area in which society is learning that secrets don’t work. They especially don’t work with matters of lineage. Bloodlines are very powerful—they hold ancient memories.

Even more important, every baby is deeply imprinted in the womb by the prenatal environment created by her mother. There is no way around this except to acknowledge the fact that none of us is a tabula rasa when we are born. On the other hand, any untoward prenatal imprint can be greatly ameliorated by how the adopted child is parented. I have always believed that we choose our parents, and that includes those who raise us. The children we raise are our children, pure and simple. I recently heard inspirational speaker Les Brown speak eloquently of being raised by an adoptive mother this way: “I was taken from the womb of my birth mother and nurtured in the heart of my adoptive mother.” I have never heard a man speak more lovingly about his mother.

It has now become the norm for adoptive parents to gather as much information as they can about their child’s birth parents and circumstances, to share it with their child when the time comes. Most children want to know their heritage. Birth mothers, too, almost always want to know where their children are and if they are all right—even when they know that they themselves are not capable of raising them adequately. In matters of adoption, the only thing that works is honesty.

FERTILITY AS METAPHOR

We must deal with the economic and social problems that are the
root causes of high fertility rates: widespread poverty and the op
pression of women. . . . When women everywhere have control
over their own reproductive choices, fertility rates drop.

—The Union of Concerned Scientists

Motherhood is not simply the organic process of giving birth . . . it
is understanding the needs of the world.

—Alexis DeVeaux, mother and sponsor of MADRE,
a Latin American relief organization

Increasingly, humans are coming to terms with the idea of sustainability, which Friends of the Earth defines as “the simple principle of taking from the Earth only what it can provide indefinitely, thus leaving future generations no less than we have access to ourselves.” We are learning that sustainability involves living within the limits of the resources of the earth while understanding the connections between our economy, our society, and our environments.

We have been clever, producing more and more food from less and less land. The Union of Concerned Scientists writes, “Our species simply cannot survive today’s recklessly accelerating population growth, the irresponsible squandering of the Earth’s resources, and the continuing destruction of our environment. . . . Every day, there are a quarter of a million more of us than there were the day before. Every week, we must find ways to feed another city the size of Philadelphia. Every month, we must wrest from the Earth additional resources to keep alive another New Jersey. And every year, we are adding another whole Mexico to the burden of this small planet.”
⁷⁹

The time of endless productivity without replenishing is coming to an end. This is why the world’s economic priorities have had to shift, fueled by the global recession that began in earnest in 2008. Women
must
use our inherent creativity—our womb power—to regenerate our planet as well as to produce the next generation. We can no longer have baby after baby with no thought for the consequences. Many of us already feel bad about disposable diapers be cause of what we know they’re doing to our planet’s landfills—but we must also look at the fact that the average child in the United States uses fifty times the resources of a child born in the Third World. Few issues are as controversial as population growth, and I don’t intend to go into that controversy here.

In the United States as well as elsewhere, women who have no means of child support bear child after child. These are the mothers who are at risk for developing problems in labor, for having growth-retarded, premature babies. But these women’s problems are
symptoms
of the imbalance in our culture— they are
not
the cause. The under lying problem is society’s treatment of women and the cycles of poverty, victimization, and abuse in which these young women stay locked.

Sixty percent of teenage mothers are victims of sexual abuse. Almost instinctively, they mate with men who then abandon them. That is all they know—a premature commitment that keeps them trapped. The only role they perceive as open to them is that of baby carrier. They don’t know that they have choices. When they think they can do little else, they have babies. The cycle continues.

When we teach young women that they have inherent worth—and that though they may choose to have a baby, there are many other opportunities open to them as well—the world changes. It’s happening right now. What if all girls knew that their menstrual cycles are part of their sacred connection with the earth and the moon—and that their sexuality needn’t necessarily be shared with men? That they could have it all to themselves if they chose? What if they didn’t measure their worth by whose baby they had or whom they were sleeping with? What if they knew that their wombs, whether or not they have children, are their bodies’ center for creativity and desire?

We need to expand the meanings of
fertility
and
birth
. We must begin to see female birth power for what it is—the basis of all of creation. When enough women sense this creative female power inherent within each of us— not dependent upon what we produce or don’t produce with our bodies—the world will change. When women tap into this power, the children, the ideas, and the new world to which we give birth will be supportive of all beings, including ourselves.

Whether we ever choose pregnancy, every one of us has encoded in our cells the knowledge of what it is to conceive, gestate, and give birth to something that grows out of our own substance. Conception, gestation, labor, and birth are physical metaphors for how all creation manifests on Earth.

On some level we all have miscarriages, abortions, dysfunctional labors, and stillbirths, as well as beautifully formed creations. We don’t need to go through these processes physically to understand them and heal from them— they’re inherent processes of nature.

Each woman must find her own truth about how to use her fertility if she is to truly flourish. The most important thing to remember is that our creative fertility in the broadest sense is with us for a lifetime—whether or not we have children.

12
Pregnancy and Birthing

For all eternity, God lies on a birthing bed, giving birth. The essence of God is Birthing.

—Meister Eckhart

THE TRANSFORMING POWER OF PREGNANCY

P
regnancy is a time to be savored and celebrated as you take part in gestating the future. It’s a miracle, really—and a crucial time in your own and your child’s development. During pregnancy you can be in touch with your
hara
—your body’s center of creation—in the most direct and power ful way possible. When a woman becomes pregnant, the hormone known as HCG (human chorionic gonadotropin, which is the basis for the pregnancy test) is produced by the placenta in vast quantities. The cells of your body haven’t seen this particular hormone since you yourself were in your mother’s womb. I believe that this is the physiologic reason why pregnancy awakens primal tribal memories about how our own bodies were formed and how they were nurtured. One of my colleagues experienced a great deal of hip pain during and after her pregnancy. When she delved into the matter, she discovered that when her mother had gone into labor with her, she had been told it wasn’t time to deliver, and so she had tried to hold back my friend’s delivery by squeezing. A psychic told my colleague that this had hurt her left hip during birth—hence the repetition of this pain during her own labor. Because your body is literally awash in the biochemistry of new beginnings, pregnancy and birth are also times to heal your past.

Pregnancy is not an illness or a time for us to be treated with kid gloves. Still, it is a period when we need quiet reflective time to tune in to ourselves and our babies. Positive inner communication between mother and baby long before birth translates into a deeper trust of each other after birth. Pregnancy is also a time to rest, which the body is primed to do. The hormone progesterone, released naturally during pregnancy, has calming and soothing effects. (It also relaxes and slows the bowel, which can lead to constipation in some women.) The body is doing a lot of inner work growing a baby. The tenor of the pregnancy itself contributes to the strength of a child’s constitution throughout the rest of his or her life. Forty weeks of gestation is a
very
short
amount of time in a woman’s life, relatively speaking. Yet it is a time that is crucial for the health of the next generation.

Quality care and education during pregnancy, along with a woman’s willingness to shore up her internal blueprint for nurturing through optimal self-care, can prevent an untold number of costly problems for the child later, including many cases of prema turity, growth retardation, mental retardation, physical disability, and learning disabilities—all of which also make the process of parenting much more difficult. Optimal care of pregnant women, who are simultaneously very powerful and vulnerable at this time, should be the highest priority in the world. Because women tend to take better care of themselves during pregnancy, it is a fantastic opportunity for them to learn more about themselves and the sources of their own vitality.

For centuries, midwives helped mothers through the pregnancy and birthing processes, standing by them with medical and emotional aid. The very word
obstetrics
is derived from the Latin word
stare,
which means “to stand by.” A woman’s body knows instinctively how to give birth and will respond in settings in which she is encouraged to move in the ways that feel right and to make the sounds that she needs to make. Modern obstetrics, however, has changed from a natural process of “standing by” and allowing the woman’s body to respond naturally into a domineering and often invasive practice. Hence the aptly named book
Pushed: The Painful Truth About
Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care,
by Jennifer Block (Da Capo Press, 2007), a volume that accurately documents the current sorry state of maternity care in the United States. Women’s cultural conditioning causes us to turn ourselves over to pregnancy experts, so most of us have lost touch with our in nate pregnancy and birthing knowledge and power, as have most of these experts, who rely on tests and machines to tell them how to help. I delivered babies for almost a decade and had two of my own before I really came to appreciate the fact that most women’s experience of pregnancy, labor, and delivery is nowhere near as empowering as it could be.

Why Have Children?

When I recall the reasons that I had children, I see how emotional and instinctual, unconscious and “tribal” my decision was. The biological pull was so strong. Those of us who’ve had a child or two have often longed to have another baby, even knowing that another child would tax our emotional and physical resources in an unhealthy way. Some women simply love being pregnant. Others adore little babies and want one around all the time. Some women are even addicted to having babies and giving birth—in part because it’s the only thing that is totally theirs in their family structure. I’ve worked with many women who have become obsessed with having another child in their late thirties or early forties, partly so that they could put off deciding what to do with their lives for another five years.

Some women use pregnancy as a way to try to fill a void in their lives that another human being can never fill. We must know ourselves intimately before we can ever be intimate with another human being. When a baby is brought into being to fill the unmet needs of an adult, the child will carry the unfair and often harmful burden of a parent’s impossible expectations. Though having a baby is rarely a strictly rational or logical decision, the decision still can be made consciously and with the wisdom of the heart. My wish for all women is that we gain the courage to understand that having a child cannot in and of itself make us happy and fulfilled. Consider this from Betsey Stevenson, assistant professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania: “Across the happiness data, the one thing in life that will make you less happy is having children. It’s true whether you’re wealthy or poor, if you have kids late or kids early. Yet I know very few people who would tell me they wish they hadn’t had kids or who would tell me they feel their kids were the destroyer of their happiness.”
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