HW 39 - Insights from Book - Part 2

The Baby Catcher by Peggy Vincent is an autobiography that illustrates the average midwifes experience. The book explains many birth scenarios the author witnessed as a midwife. The book does a good job explaining what each mother felt, said and how their experience went. In the second one hundred pages the book talks about the different birth experiences women have, and so far most of them have been positive. For example for some of the births Peggy Vincent talks about how some women have un-painful, births but rather pleasuring. Pleasuring, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, because the women felt a sense of relief and happiness to release a part of her and a part of something off to the world, so it didn’t affect them much physically. Vincent also talks about the joy she gets being a midwife, because she sees the mother’s true feelings. That sort of reminded me of Janet when she came to our class and spoke about her birthing experience and how after she delivered her baby she wasn’t automatically attached the first time she held her daughter. Which I than compared to many of the midwife births we’ve seen in the business of being born, the mother tends to seem very happy and content with their birth, and seem to be happy to see their baby for the first time, which to me seems like a connection. But I feel that mothers, who have babies in hospitals, seem to have an industrial nightmarish vibe when birthing children. And because hospitals make women work harder to give birth to the child the mother is more exhausted than a mother who has a child at a birthing center or at home, causing her to be less interested. Another key point which we learned about, was how births in the 70’s during the hippie movement, were trying to re bring midwifery, but during that same time hospitals technology improved, causing a boom in hospital birth, causing a less popular trend of midwife births.