Photo provided by the author

Editor’s note: This article first appeared in Midwifery Today, Issue 128, Winter 2018.
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I had my first homebirth underground in 1978. There was no other way around it. My best friend, nearly 6 feet tall, with babies who weighed closer to 13 pounds than 12, also birthed at home. “We were pioneers. We were ahead of our time,” she told me recently as we reflected on the innate power of those days. What a contrast to the many wimyn in our current societies who lack and seem afraid of raw instinct in childbirth.

We birthed at home without professional anybodies. We were smart, instinctual, and determined. We studied ourselves and nature and asked obvious questions.

• Why wouldn’t our bodies work right at birth? They pee and poop right.
• Who said we couldn’t birth? Men? White, fat, over 65-year-old men.
• Why did people threaten us with death? We were talking about life.
• What mother would want strangers up in her business and taking her baby? We didn’t.
• What is crazier and scarier: home or hospital?          H O S P I T A L !

We would walk down the street and see pregnant wimyn who had puffy faces, swollen eyes, dry lips, fatigued gaits, dull eyes, and tight butts. “Ah! She must be under the expert care of a board-certified obstetrician!” we concluded.

We developed wisdom phrases such as:

• If you can grow it, you can birth it!
• If you feel strong and healthy, you are strong and healthy.
• If someone thinks a baby shouldn’t be born at home, they shouldn’t do it—especially if they are men.
• Down and out, not up and in.
• You can’t raise a child sitting on a sofa.

We birthed in the dark and left umbilical cords alone and nursed while we slept. We carried our babies on our bodies. We lived together for weeks at a time. We stayed curious, capable, connected, communal, clear headed, clean hearted, and self caring. Raw instinct was our caution and our guide.

We read a few books. The Continuum Concept by Jean Leidloff. Magical Child Matures by Joseph Chilton Pearce. Spiritual Midwifery—when it was just stories. We studied Klaus, Kennell, Niles Newton, and others for what lies beyond birth for newborns. We agreed that “we love to the extent we have known love.” We were fierce self-advocates. Why? Why not! We couldn’t imagine birthing or mothering any less than a wild creature. We were not captured or in a zoo or overly domesticated. It was horrifying to think we would birth like a captured animal.

We were too smart. Too female. Too untamed.

Amory was born in 1978 by moonlight with her father and me, alone in the family bedroom. My womb waterbag had been broken for four days. Her 3-year-old sister finally nursed long enough to produce strong, dedicated contractions that ended the vigil of waiting. I birthed on my side.

I looked at her. She was blue.
I touched her. She was warm.
I lifted her to my chest. She moved.
I covered her with sounds of relief and ecstasy. She made sounds back.
I held her close and kissed her over and over. Her color changed.
Everything changed. Time stopped. We breathed in rhythm and our eyes searched one another as we lay quietly together with moonlight as our blanket. It was summer.

Everything changed. Time stopped. We breathed in rhythm and our eyes searched one another as we lay quietly together with moonlight as our blanket. It was summer.

Midwifery was defined in Missouri law as the practice of medicine. Doctors were the only legal attendants and often we were threatened with the desperate coercive question, “How will you feel if you have to hold a dead baby?” We seriously pondered this question and concluded that, if indeed our baby died, we absolutely were the ones who wanted to be holding her.

But what if she didn’t die? What was she going to live with? This question still echoes in my mind 40 years later this very night, the eve of Amory’s 40th birthday. What do babies live with?

What if they were born with only their mother’s eyes to look into? Their mother’s voice to hear? Their mother’s touch to feel? Their mother’s kisses or licks or nuzzles or desire covering their delicate skin where literally millions of dendritic neurons are being created to “sense” this new world? What if their mother’s spirit calling them into their first breaths has more power than any other? The birth of a baby is the birth of a love that knows no equal. What if it makes the difference between health and dis-ease? What if a lifetime of happiness and emotional stability has its origin in those first moments? What if millions of years of biology have been working to protect the bond between a birthing mother and her baby for reasons greater than the microbiota and that defy science? What if it does matter? Every moment. Every breath. Every imprint. Who would know the answer better than a mother? We were mothers and we knew the answer. No one could cage us.

Amory’s gentle and unique birth, outside the legal and medical parameters of the time, was the beginning of radical newborn first breaths and primal imprinting: sacred and essential work that would resurface in my life four decades later.

Each day, several times a day, we put Amory back into the water for her “return to womb” time. We observed her revert to her perinatal life. She needed dim light, no words, deep water, and unrushed time from beginning to middle to end.

Instinctually, we experimented. We oscillated between large movements in the air simulating primate and primal movements we imagined—as if we were living in the wild. (Think of monkeys swinging from tree to tree.) Millions of years of biology have prepared the newborn to anticipate this type of stimulus and indeed require it for healthy development. Alternating, we placed Amory back into the water.

During her daily water play she would follow the same predictable pattern, whether for 10 minutes or 30. We placed her on her back with the water past her ears and covering as much of her body as possible. She would begin slow, irregular bilateral moves, eyes darting, sounds scattered. Then she would “feel” the water, tasting it with her head turned and moving her digits through it slowly. She would then enter an altered mental/emotional state. Her eyes became fixed and focused on some point in space. Her movements took on a rapid rhythm. Her sounds became shallow and rhythmic. The bilateral moves became unilateral: arms and legs working in harmony with breath and some fixed point of the mind.

We stayed back and made no interruptive comments. We simply observed at a distance. When she tired, we gently and slowly lifted her and began the Indian oil massage described by Leboyer. She slept deeply.

We offered a balance of familiarity and stimulus for maximum whole body health. She created the wild water movements as she had in the womb at zero gravity and we created the wild gravity movements for her forward development.

As the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, we expanded the opportunities. If she was fussy, I would tie her on my back and pretend a tiger was after us and run for our lives. She quieted immediately, as the power and strength and long stride movements increased. She was wide-eyed and alert and wanted more. When she began to take hold of things, we handed the item to her feet and toes rather than her hands and fingers. Her father rigged a toy line where only her feet could reach the toys, and we watched her sensory acuity soar.

Inspired by the ways of indigenous peoples and my Cherokee upbringing, we left her to explore climbing and edges in nature from her own inner guide. We kept her feet and legs bare so she could mobilize throughout her environment, especially outdoors. Before she could walk, she would climb the ladder of a high slide, go down backward, and crawl to the ladder again and again. She explored the edges of cliffs with her feet and hands and some sixth sense. At night she returned to her mesmerized state in the water.

Not until I had the privilege of being in Russia and working alongside the disciples of Igor Charkovsky did I meet folks doing similar experiments with children at birth. I cried with everything I saw and marveled that we were separated only by distance, politics, and lack of modern technology. On two different continents at the same time, we were making similar discoveries.

Now the connections are becoming clearer. Homebirth, first breaths, re-immersion in water, and primate movement are a biological continuum for mamababy. They require physical, social, and emotional freedom from observation, comment, praise, or criticism. Intimate bonding with an immeasurable sense of belonging are not only birthrights but are time-specific elements that contribute to lifelong well-being. Well-being that affects not only the individual’s first breath, health, and happiness but also those of society and future generations.

So simple. So instinctual. So sacred. How to protect it? A she-bear will. A she-wolf will. Why not a she-human?

After four decades of trying to preserve instinctual birth by preserving midwives, I was watching undisturbed birth become extinct. Creating prenatal villages all over the world has helped. Among those brave and great souls, there began to grow an interest in these deeper issues that are part of the return of primal instinct in childbirth. Childbirth is a unique moment of intended empowerment in every mother’s life.

When it comes to childbirth, what a womyn does instinctually is the right thing to do. I have watched a womyn tied down during a cesarean exhibit the same behaviors that contribute to newborn first breaths as surely as a freebirthing womyn does. Instinct injury can be healed in childbirth. Sometimes a baby’s life depends on it.

No one has to teach instinct. These behaviors are innate and universal. They are meant to be undisturbed and, ideally, unobserved. They are nature’s life-saving imprint for lifelong health and bonding. Most of our planet’s babies today are imprinted with plastic, metal, pain, strangers, machine sounds, and contaminated air. Their oxygenated cords are cut prematurely and their body’s organs must process induction drugs, antibiotics, and injections before they have a chance for a clean first breath. Mothers are distanced from their babies by fear, strangers, professionals, protocols, routines, standards of care, machine lines, drugged bodies and minds, and an utter failure in mammalian instinct. How did mothers get persuaded to make such a poor bargain in childbirth?

The power of wimyn matters to me. Birth is the beginning of everything else.

I began to teach others.

I do this around the world but recently, one of our community mothers became fascinated with the wisdom ways I describe here. She gave birth to her fourth child at home. Alone in her bathtub, Karrisa birthed a healthy son seven days after her womb waterbag had broken. She described the exhilarating and tender moment of seeing her son unfurl into the water and spread his arms like wings. While he was still under water, she gently turned him over and let their eyes find each other. Gently, she raised only his face above the water. Wide-eyed, she watched as he spewed and sputtered and breathed his first breaths with no other influence than his mother. Both of them were turned inside out, undisturbed and supported by a biology of intelligence so intuitive, so instinctual, so ancient that what it preserves is beyond measure and defies the intellect. The old brain captures in seconds what the new brain integrates for a lifetime. For the next five hours they bonded, breastfed, and enjoyed first breaths in the birth water. A landing pad made alongside the birthing tub turned Karrisa’s bathroom into a birth sanctuary. It was their home for the first four days of Mathias’s life. Into this bathroom sanctuary we carried food, drinks, candles, whispers, siblings, linens, and herbs. Mathias knew no artificial light that first week of life.

Every day he returned to the water and together they discovered for themselves these same truths I have described here for you.

While we wait for science to affirm and confirm the positive short- and long-term effects of innate maternal behaviors, there is no time to lose in supporting new mothers who are fierce protectors of their child’s first breaths.

At birth, we imprint our babies and ourselves for life. Imagine your highest ideal and strive for it. If it feels radical, remember that it is probably close to how your great-great-great-grandmother birthed. What is possible for one womyn can become possible for you. Her blood runs thick in your veins. So does her wild nature instinct. Take heart. Take courage. You may be preserving something very important for your great-great-great-granddaughter.