What Does Change Look Like?

This blog has focused on the multitude of issues surrounding justice in childbirth options for women. As it stands now, women in the U.S. are afraid of childbirth because they believe it is a dangerous process (because the profits of medical intervention benefit indirectly from such beliefs) and these ideas are passed down from woman-to-woman, generation-to-generation. Women do not believe in the abilities of their bodies. As a result, they submit to unnecessary medical interventions and processes, in general, that disempower them. So women are passive participants in a normal, natural bodily process where their bodies are disrespected and mutilated in order to preserve a feigned sense of safety.

So, what would it look like if women were empowered, respected, celebrated, and given informed choices in their childbirth experiences? Here are a few ideas, both real (based on pockets of real success in certain areas) and imagined:

• Women would look forward to the births of their babies, not just because their babies will join them, but because the experience itself is a right of passage that shows women their strength, their ability, and their right to be nurtured.
• Women will hear positive stories of encouragement and empowerment during pregnancy, so that they will yearn to share their own positive stories to other women and girls.
• Women will understand and take for granted that the choices for their maternity care are theirs--they will know that they have the right to choose where to give birth, choose their provider (without restrictions from insurance companies, etc.), and choose which procedures to accept or deny (without guilt or retribution).
• Maternity care will be subject to transparency and strict regulation regarding its practice. Women will be able to make choices based on all available evidence and providers will be held accountable for decisions that are not evidence-based.
• Profit and litigation will not be motivating factors in the decisions made for maternity care.
• The vast majority of birth (90-95%) will happen without medical interference, pharmaceutical drugs, or surgical procedures. Instead, women and babies will be helped and soothed with nutrition, manual and positional methods, personal hands-on care, adequate emotional support, and social services that employ one-on-one woman-assisted companionship to assist with the care of their babies.

In the future, women will be the main leaders in dictating their care, because pregnancy and birth are not diseases or emergencies. Birth is a natural process and a rite of passage, and the future of birth will reflect this paradigm.