The birth world is a mirror

This is a reflection from my friend Heidi, a midwife.

The birth world is a mirror of larger, weirder, scarier things in our culture -- about how we regard women, mothers, mother earth. When the mother is harmed, how can she care for her babies, and how does a society of motherless children -- not nursed, given no breast milk, knowing no comfort but left to cry it out -- how do they function? I feel like we are a society of motherless children, separated from love, from our ability to be self referring, separated from trust in our own instincts and trust that we will be cared for, by our mothers, and by extension -- by God. I believe that how children experience their mother in early life is how they experience God. If you can not trust your mother, if she does not care for you, then you do not trust God will care for you or that your needs will ever be met. And people that do not trust that they will be cared for act crazy in lots of ways.Mother-Earth, that is a very deep idea. It is a powerful thing to be able to intervene and break the bonds between mother & child, and take away the feminine power of the mother. It is the fundamental sickness in our world to me. I think the strangely out of proportion opposition to midwives -- the venomous, irrational hatred of midwives -- is a reaction to that deep seated, underlying issue.

When women have control of birth, when mothers and midwives are in control of something as important as birth, we hold the power to something that can change society completely: LOVE. We learn love at home. On a body level we get that love or lack or love from our families, and the quality of the love we get in our family is the quality of love we have to share the world. I think opposition to midwives is an old archetypal battle of male vs female energies, of warring culture vs loving culture. I think that with out even consciously understanding their motives and reactions people in power want to stop the mother, and they want to stop the midwives. And I think its why so many women are attracted to birth work, is because we suspect that we are doing more than helping women have babies -- we are healing a rift in the planetary consciousness when a mother-baby makes it through all that with their instincts intact and in love.