Robbie Davis-Floyd, PhD
Medical anthropologist
Austin, Texas
www.davis-floyd.com

More about Robbie Davis-Floyd

 

This film makes me want to take action! How can I get involved?

In the United States, I suggest that you join the Coalition for Improving Maternity Services (CIMS). CIMS is a collaborative effort of numerous individuals and more than 50 organizations representing over 90,000 members. Its mission is to promote a wellness model of maternity care that will improve birth outcomes and substantially reduce costs. CIMS offers many exciting opportunities for volunteerism.

To learn more:
www.motherfriendly.org

Internationally, I suggest that you sign on as a supporter of the International MotherBaby Childbirth Initiative (IMBCI): 10 Steps to Optimal Maternity Services and use the IMBCI to promote optimal birth in your community or country. The IMBCI is based on the results of a survey of birth and breastfeeding organizations in 163 countries and on input from international agencies and individual birth experts all over the world.

The purpose of the IMBCI 10 Steps is to improve care throughout the childbearing continuum in order to save lives, prevent harm from the overuse of obstetric technologies, and promote health for mothers and babies around the world. Individuals and organizations can adopt the IMBCI as a focal point for their advocacy work and use it as an educational instrument and guide to help hospitals improve their maternity care. Hospitals can work to achieve the 10 Steps as a means of providing optimal MotherBaby care.

To learn more:
www.imbci.org

How will my caregiver’s beliefs about birth affect my birth experience?

What a caregiver—a doctor, nurse, or midwife—believes about birth will have a major effect on your birth experience; in fact, it is likely to determine whether you have a normal or a highly technological birth.

Around the world, there are three major paradigms of birth and health care: the technocratic, humanistic, and holistic models.

The technocratic model, dominant almost everywhere, views the birthing body as a dysfunctional machine about to break down at any moment and in need of constant vigilance and regular intervention to function properly.

Humanistic practitioners, especially midwives, view the body as a sensitive organism; stress the importance of respect, caring, and compassion for the birthing woman; and work to avoid intervention by supporting the normal physiology of birth—encouraging the mother to eat and drink during labor to keep her strength up . . . giving her full emotional and physical support through touch, holding, and massage . . . and supporting her to give birth in upright positions.

Holistic practitioners, usually midwives, think of the body as an energy field, see birth as not only a physical and emotional but also a spiritual experience, and trust in the mother’s own intuitive inner knowing about her ability to birth.

If your practitioner practices technocratically, you are almost certain to have a great deal of technological intervention in your birth—to have your labor induced or augmented with Pitocin, to be continually tied to the electronic fetal monitor, to have an epidural, and, a third of the time, to have a cesarean delivery.

If your practitioner is humanistic and holistic, meaning that he or she trusts your body, your baby, and the birth process, you are very likely to have a normal and highly empowering birth. In other words, the paradigm of the practitioner is a primary determinant of the outcome of birth. What you want in birth does not count nearly as much as what your practitioner believes about birth and the female body.

Why do doctors intervene so much in the birth process?

A large part of the reason is that technocratic practitioners are deeply afraid of birth. As a result, they overuse technology in an effort to make themselves feel in control of a process they don’t really understand.

Why isn’t that OK? Because, as I say in Orgasmic Birth, the overuse of drugs and technology interferes with the normal physiology of birth and causes far more harm than good. It is a sad fact that obstetricians are not trained in and do not understand the normal physiology of birth. How could they be? Only about 3% of births in the United States, including those that take place at home, are normal; drugs and technology dominate all the rest. Doctors almost never see normal birth. Therefore, they have no opportunity to learn about it. Midwives have a far better understanding of the normal physiology of birth and how to support it than obstetricians do.

What needs to change most for normal birth to become the norm again?

The education of obstetricians. If obstetricians were educated to understand and support normal birth, the kind of care they provide would change. They would believe in women’s ability to give birth. They would support the idea that midwives should care for the majority of women whose births are proceeding normally. They would reserve their medical knowledge for the few women who truly needed their high-level skills and ability to use sophisticated technical equipment.

To learn more about my anthropological perspective on birth:
www.davis-floyd.com