Birth. It’s a Feminist Issue.

You’re pregnant. You’re blooming, (and slightly uncomfortable at times if you’re honest), but inside of you, you can feel the life of your soon to be newborn baby moving around inside of you.

It’s madness if you think about it right?

A baby.

Growing. Inside of YOU.

From an egg that met with sperm, to quickly multiplying cells, to skin, and bone, to fingers and toes, brains, and eyes, ears and lips.

A fully formed human being.

Growing.

Inside of you.

Let that sink in for a moment.

YOU ARE GROWING A TINY HUMAN.

How are you doing it? What are you rationally doing each day to make sure that you’re growing this baby? What are the step by step instructions you can give to me about how you’re making this happen?

Oh.

That’s a tough one right?

Don’t worry. It’s a trick question. Obviously you can’t explain how you’re growing your baby. It’s just happening. Without you even thinking about it.

You’re performing what can only be described as a full blown miracle. There’s no rational explanation for how it’s happening, it just is. And you’re incredible.

Let THAT sink in for a moment.

For centuries women have been told how they’re “not good enough”, how they “can’t do this”, or been “forbidden from doing that”. When all along, we’ve been the god damn keepers of life. We’re the ones that are central to the continuation of the human race.

We. Are. Incredible.

I need you to feel into that for a moment.

Because from all my work with women, I know it’s not what we feel by any stretch of the imagination.

Now, fast forward to your birth. The day you go into labour, and you welcome your fully grown little human into this world.

How does that make you feel? Anxious? Scared? Worried that you can’t do it?

Hold up.

We just agreed that you’re a miracle worker.

YOU. ARE. GROWING. LIFE.

YOU. ARE. INCREDIBLE.

YOU ARE ABLE TO ACHIEVE ABSOLUTE GREATNESS.

You’re doing things beyond the capacity of the human brain to compute and you’re not even thinking about it.

Let me tell you, if men could grow and birth life, they’d have gotten some Nobel prize by now. So why, as women, do we feel incapable of birthing safely and confidently without a team of medical professionals surrounding us?

By the time we reach birth we’ve done ALL the hard work. Then we applaud and salute the doctors for safely bringing them into this world.

Mad. Ness.

Out of the 2 processes involved in having a baby, birthing a baby, is MUCH simpler than growing one, yet it’s the one we allow to bamboozle us.

Bamboozle us, with terrifying consequences might I add.

Postpartum mental health is at crisis point.

More and more women are holding their hands up to feeling lost, alone and struggling emotionally post birth and the way we are birthing plays a HUGE role in that.

I can wholeheartedly say, that it’s time that as women that we took back our power when it comes to birth.

That we look at the rite of passage of birth and motherhood as something profound and life changing, and that we begin to prepare for it in this way.

Too many of us go into survival mode and in a sheer moment of panic, hand the all-important reigns over to a team of medical professionals who take our birth right away from us. It’s this that leaves us missing something on the other side. It’s this that makes us feel empty and useless.

It’s not the sleepless nights, (although yes that’s tough and contributes to feeling low), it’s our higher selves, the parts of us who know our greatness, mourning our loss of initiation into motherhood via empowered birth.

So, next time you think about birth, I want you to stop, place your hand on your bump, and think about the miracle that you perform each and every moment of every day as you grow and nurture your baby, and then I want you to start to understand how you are MORE than capable of birthing your baby in an empowered, calm, confident and safe way.

We need to be more open to new ways of educating ourselves about birth. We need to ditch the scare stories steeped in lies and moulded by time and we need to start to break away from fear and move into trust and love for ourselves, our bodies and our capabilities.

So when I say birth is a feminist issue. I mean it. It’s our MOST feminist issue. And if we want to change the way that women are accepted into and seen in society, then we need to change the way we birth.