Selected Homebirth Writing
Damara's Birth: September 25, 1974
The story of my daughter's homebirth in which I gave birth to my midwifery self
My decision to have a homebirth was both simple and very complex. It was simple in that from the very beginning of this pregnancy it never entered my head that this baby would be born anywhere but in our home. It was complex because the decision to do this personally represented a stage of growth and awareness of many issues — social, philosophical, political and even spiritual. They related to my sense of being a woman in touch with and responsible for my own body. It had to do with our sense of family, of the naturalness of life, of birth, of sexuality.
We were learning slowly and somewhat painfully, but gladly, a sense of the seasons of things. We wanted our children to learn these things naturally from the early years of their lives. Being part of Damara’s birth in our own home with our friends we felt was a way of doing this. I wanted to have a real choice about how and with whom I gave birth. I wanted to shape and create the environment our child would be born into. I wanted her birth to be a celebration; I wanted her to be born in a happy, colorful, yet peaceful place. I wanted music for labor and people to support me and celebrate with us. Mostly I didn’t want the rhythm of our life disrupted by separation from each other or from Jonathan and Peter.
I had also developed strong feelings about what technology, inappropriately used, and what institutions that become ends in themselves, can do to depersonalize, dehumanize and in many ways take from us the most basic and peak experiences of life, like birth...and death. They can become so removed from us that we don’t even experience them.
I had felt painful ruptures in the births of my other two children and had been able to reflect on what had happened to me and to them and why it shouldn’t again. Most painful had been that initial ten to fourteen hour separation routine in most hospitals. My best instincts told me that initial contact and being together was critical and that separation was no less painful for the one born than it was for me. At home we knew there would be no separation. At it turned out it was those first few hours of skin-closeness and warmth and wonder that was most precious to me.
Read full birth story here.
We were learning slowly and somewhat painfully, but gladly, a sense of the seasons of things. We wanted our children to learn these things naturally from the early years of their lives. Being part of Damara’s birth in our own home with our friends we felt was a way of doing this. I wanted to have a real choice about how and with whom I gave birth. I wanted to shape and create the environment our child would be born into. I wanted her birth to be a celebration; I wanted her to be born in a happy, colorful, yet peaceful place. I wanted music for labor and people to support me and celebrate with us. Mostly I didn’t want the rhythm of our life disrupted by separation from each other or from Jonathan and Peter.
I had also developed strong feelings about what technology, inappropriately used, and what institutions that become ends in themselves, can do to depersonalize, dehumanize and in many ways take from us the most basic and peak experiences of life, like birth...and death. They can become so removed from us that we don’t even experience them.
I had felt painful ruptures in the births of my other two children and had been able to reflect on what had happened to me and to them and why it shouldn’t again. Most painful had been that initial ten to fourteen hour separation routine in most hospitals. My best instincts told me that initial contact and being together was critical and that separation was no less painful for the one born than it was for me. At home we knew there would be no separation. At it turned out it was those first few hours of skin-closeness and warmth and wonder that was most precious to me.
Read full birth story here.
The Spirituality of Birth, Homebirth & Community Midwifery
Presented by Judy Luce at the Luddite Congress held in Barnesville, Ohio in 1993
I’ve never sung outside the shower alone, but since being asked by Scott to come to this Congress, a refrain has been going 'round and 'round in my head and my heart that speaks to the ground on which I stand as a midwife and the Spirit that informs my life and my work:
“Song in our silence, light in our darkness,
Water of life for our thirst.
You are the freshness of birth every morning,
The grace that encircles our days.”
I am a lay-midwife — a community midwife, and have been working with childbearing women and their families attending births at home for nearly twenty years. I am apprentice trained. In the deepest sense birth and the childbearing experiences of women were my teachers — not information about birth, but the experience of birth, the awesome physical and spiritual and cosmic unfolding of birth with its natural and varied rhythms and expressions. I learned this in the context of family and community. I learned this in a seeking community of women who desired to support normal birth, and preserve natural birth and the possibility of home birth for families — in all its spiritual and social dimensions.
I am proud to be a “lay midwife.” George Bernard Shaw says that all professionalization represents a conspiracy against the laity. I would say “professionalization” disempowers and is an expression of market control — service and journeying-with become product. As a lay midwife I honor where the most essential wisdom and knowledge of birth lie — not in science and technology and medical definitions, but in a woman’s body, in the flowering of the natural birth process, in the language — the poetry and the metaphor and the stories — that grow from experience, and in the natural world of which human birth is a part. I honor the reality of birth and trust its process. I see taking responsibility not as taking control but as being responsive to the nature and unfolding of the event. It is a dance in which we are shaped by the music and asked to interpret it.
As a midwife I walk with women and families and support them and the birth process by my watchful presence, by listening and by teaching. I experience midwifery as a calling, a vocation not just to assist women in childbirth, but to speak from the mountains what I SEE. I view myself as a cultural worker and a storyteller who helps to preserve the culture of natural and women-centered birth by reflecting upon its meaning and helping to transform the larger society through the witness of birth and the retelling of the stories that embody in their narrative what is being preserved and what is being destroyed and lost. I see the practice of midwifery as a way of protecting women and birth against the colonization of their bodies and birth by invasive and altering technologies and the violation that accompanies unnecessary cesarean sections.
Read full speech here.
“Song in our silence, light in our darkness,
Water of life for our thirst.
You are the freshness of birth every morning,
The grace that encircles our days.”
I am a lay-midwife — a community midwife, and have been working with childbearing women and their families attending births at home for nearly twenty years. I am apprentice trained. In the deepest sense birth and the childbearing experiences of women were my teachers — not information about birth, but the experience of birth, the awesome physical and spiritual and cosmic unfolding of birth with its natural and varied rhythms and expressions. I learned this in the context of family and community. I learned this in a seeking community of women who desired to support normal birth, and preserve natural birth and the possibility of home birth for families — in all its spiritual and social dimensions.
I am proud to be a “lay midwife.” George Bernard Shaw says that all professionalization represents a conspiracy against the laity. I would say “professionalization” disempowers and is an expression of market control — service and journeying-with become product. As a lay midwife I honor where the most essential wisdom and knowledge of birth lie — not in science and technology and medical definitions, but in a woman’s body, in the flowering of the natural birth process, in the language — the poetry and the metaphor and the stories — that grow from experience, and in the natural world of which human birth is a part. I honor the reality of birth and trust its process. I see taking responsibility not as taking control but as being responsive to the nature and unfolding of the event. It is a dance in which we are shaped by the music and asked to interpret it.
As a midwife I walk with women and families and support them and the birth process by my watchful presence, by listening and by teaching. I experience midwifery as a calling, a vocation not just to assist women in childbirth, but to speak from the mountains what I SEE. I view myself as a cultural worker and a storyteller who helps to preserve the culture of natural and women-centered birth by reflecting upon its meaning and helping to transform the larger society through the witness of birth and the retelling of the stories that embody in their narrative what is being preserved and what is being destroyed and lost. I see the practice of midwifery as a way of protecting women and birth against the colonization of their bodies and birth by invasive and altering technologies and the violation that accompanies unnecessary cesarean sections.
Read full speech here.