The Problem with Shrinkage
Some experts claim that falling fertility rates and declining populations are good for us. They’re wrong.
It would seem to me that talking about declining birth rates, without mentioning even one time, actual birthing methods and traumas would be like talking about Christianity, but forgetting to mention Christ. These population hand wringers don’t seem to connect the dots that when birthing women are TERRIFIED to give birth, that is going to have an impact on their decision to become a mother.
If we could have some serious world wide birth reform, my guess is that the population shrinkage would reverse itself in one or two generations.
But we birth activists are often lonely voices yelling in the muffled cacophony of a symphony of allopathic drugs and surgery medicine and birthing traditions handed down to us from our most medicated and propagandized grandparents. Yes, they were the greatest generation, but they are also the most drugged, the most prone to being brainwashed by the media, and the most die hard adherents to a failed system.
And they are paying the price for all those chemicals. This satire from Mad TV always makes me feel sad.

Although funny, the pathetic existence of our drugged and “better living through chemistry” parents and grandparents is just sickening to me, as their beautiful lives wind down to a hellish existence of alzheimers and chemical overload.
I would like to pay tribute to my friend Anna. She was my visiting teacher for a couple years, and we became very good friends during that time.
What I found most interesting about this woman in her healthy 90’s was her absolute lack of dementia. She was clear as a bell, and fearless about sharing her views on any number of topics. She was the mother of five and grew up in Idaho. After her children were grown she worked as a waitress for years, and now enjoys time moving from place to place helping her grown children and grandchildren and great grandchilren with life.

As we visited during those months when she came to see me, I found a kindred spirit in terms of our views on modernity.
She told me that she gave birth to her son at home two months premature. While he was very small, she said she just wrapped her body around him for two months and breastfed him on demand and he thrived with her cuddles and milk. She told me that by the time her younger children were born she was “forced” (her words) to give birth in a maternity home. I asked her if they had a hospital where women were giving birth and she said, “oh yes”, but she was adament that she did not give birth there, but rather in the maternity home, which sounds like it was a home like birthing center. The distinction was important to her.
She told me she felt strongly about phonics for reading, and held in complete scorn those women who would put their children in a little box away from the family (again her words). She told me that every other mammal cuddles the young and keeps them close to momma when they are babes.
She was into alternative healing. She told me of a time when she had breast cancer. She did not tell anyone, not even her husband, because she knew they would all want her to do chemo and surgery. Instead she went to a healer in the south west and he used a machine on her that thrust the poison out of her body. I’m not sure what it was, but she said that the lymph tissue poured out of her, through a scar in her side, by the cup full until she was healed.
We had so much to talk about in regards to natural mothering and how to raise families that I was forced to admit that I had finally met an older woman who had shunned modernity and thought for herself. She was a far cry from my own grandma, who when she heard I was planning to give birth without drugs, was afraid that I was losing my mind, and later on when I did have the nervous breakdown, she blamed it all on my lack of medicine during Michelle’s natural birth.
She did not seem to connect that many of her own problems, health and otherwise, may have stemmed from her horrific hospital births. She said over and over her sons births were the most negative experiences of her life. Yet she fully expected all of her daughters and grandaughters to do exactly what she did when we gave birth. My grandma loved all of us very much and I am not saying this to diss her, but rather to prove that once enmeshed within the allopathic web of deceit, the tentacles can pull hard on a family for several generations.
We will never achieve real health and prosperity as a society until we reverse the trends with our young people. Each and every baby should be built in the womb holistically and happily and then gently birthed, with years of one on one bonding with mother and father.
Trends being what they are….I predict that by 2080 only a certain segment of our population will even be willing to give birth at all.
Jenny Hatch