What Is a Birth without Loving Touch?

by Naolí Vinaver

© 2009 Midwifery Today, Inc. All rights reserved.

[Editor's note: This is an excerpt of an article which appears in Midwifery Today Issue 92, Winter 2009/2010. View other great articles and columns in the table of contents. To read the rest of this article, order your copy of Midwifery Today Issue 92.]
Photos provided by the author

Touch is a basic need in the lives of beings. We depend on touch to survive at many levels. Humans and animals—we all crave it, need it, appreciate it and use it effectively for our benefit. At least, when we are babies and at the very beginnings of our lives, we are intimately connected to our mothers and rely on touch, smell and physical closeness for not only our survival, but also for the optimization of our health and well-being. It is later in life that some cultures have a tendency to move away from physical touch, but this is not necessarily due to the lack of a need for it, but rather as a curbing and civilizing of our animal instincts, which humans have been considering in the last centuries mostly as “lowly” or as “far away from ‘godly.’”

It is through touch that energy can be shared, uplifted, rooted, moved and used as fuel, as we give it and receive it. This is why touch and massage for pregnancy and birth can be especially important, as women in labor need to move a lot of energy through themselves, give themselves into a lot of energy, and allow a great many changes in their souls and bodies in order to open up to give birth.

Fear can be a very tricky challenge to surpass for many women, as society and the medical system have specialized in past and current decades in feeding and focusing on the fearsome aspects of birth. Feeding women their insecurities and strengthening their lack of self-esteem and power has no doubt been a strategic means of controlling women’s decision power in their everyday lives, but also, quite specifically, in pregnancy and childbearing.

Naolí Vinaver is a Mexican midwife who combines traditional birth practices with a profound interest in and respect for the physiology of natural birth. She has been attending both waterbirths and births in traditional styles and positions since 1990. Naolí has enjoyed three pregnancies and homebirths of her own in the company of her family. She is in the process of writing and illustrating a couple of children’s books about life, pregnancy and birth, while continuing her homebirth practice in both rural and urban Veracruz State, Mexico.

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