It was my complete honor to organize the 2nd Husband/Wife Homebirth Conference in Colorado in 2001. Â Since the Conference Paul and I have added another son to our family. Freeborn Benjamin Johnson is featured in the video above.
“As residents of the world’s consumer capital, New Yorkers can have anything delivered to their door at any time. They can have their hair cut in the living room, have champagne and caviar rushed to them on a whim, enjoy a shiatsu massage in their own bed or invite a clairvoyant to predict their future from Tarot cards laid out on the kitchen table.
But there is one thing that is currently unavailable for delivery to those who live in this most can-do of metropolises. Women can not legally give birth at home in the presence of a trained and experienced midwife.
This city of more than 8 million people, with its reputation for being at the cutting-edge of modern urban living, now lacks a single midwife legally permitted to help women have a baby in their own homes. “It’s pretty shocking that in a city where you can get anything any hour of the day a person cannot give birth at home with a trained practitioner,” said Elan McAllister, president of the New York-based Choices in Childbirth.
The collapse of New York’s legal home birth midwifery services has come as a result of the closure two weeks ago of one of the most progressive hospitals in the city, St Vincent’s in Manhattan. When the bankrupt hospital shut its doors on 30 April the midwives suddenly found themselves without any backing or support.”
Once in a great while I am tempted to pull my young friends who are newly married and just getting ready to start a family aside and ask them to have a little chat…
I would ask them to imagine a world where the only thing Women know about sex is brutal rape. And in this pathetic world, not one of the women was aware that anything else existed except the compulsion, control, manipulation, and horror of rape when they had sex.
And then I would ask them to imagine some person coming in to this group of women and attempting to teach them about normal, married, gentle, orgasmic sexuality.
It is the only analogy I can think of when considering the work that we who promote homebirth have been engaged in.
We are attempting to teach those who have been bullied, cut, drugged, sutured, manipulated with every form of media in the most intense psychological programming in the history of the world, that birth is normal, natural, safe, healthy, orgasmic, spiritual, satisfying, and should be done in the sanctity of the home.
Those who have been most brutalized and manipulated during Allopathic birth are often those most unwilling to look at homebirth as a reasonable option.
We now live in a world where the vast majority of Mothers have been groomed to accept birth rape as normal and healthy, and where most Fathers have been groomed to believe the best thing they can do for their wives is to hand them over to the medical profession when the baby is due to be born, and then humbly pay the bills.
We who have experienced the joy and beauty of homebirth want to yell to those families…”Free yourselves! Freedom and health are waiting for you just on the other side of your leap of faith.”
Brave? Ignorant? Nope, just pure unadulterated FAITH!
Our Closing Keynote Speakers at the Conference were Rico and the late, Jeannine Parvati-Baker
