I feel like people rarely understand why I chose natural childbirth. I was twenty years old and had a strong desire to understand birth as a life process. I didn't want machines and tubes and heart sounds and a bed with motors. I didn't want random medical personnel to experience any part of my ceremony. I wanted familiarity and energy that transcends scientific logic and the day. That travels back further than me, my mother, and grandmother's grandmother's mother. Something so far away that it threads a continuum of time like the interlocking helix. I wanted it to be done with love and that's why I chose a midwife.

Why Midwives? I have spent so much time agonizing over how to approach this question because my immediate reaction is: of course midwives.

Midwives are the traditional birth attendants of the world. Ask you mom or grandmother and they may tell you a story of a midwife or birth with one. Although in some countries midwives are the only attendants accessible to some women and staffing most of the urban clinics in the United States. There is a different philosophy behind midwifery. It's the difference between "managing" a birth under the time constraints of medical industry and allowing the women to labor. I feel midwifery is that observant eye nurturing the flower to bloom and not prying it open with interventions. It's the belief in the process of a woman and the ceremony of birth.

It's a very different feel between these two worlds-medicalized labor and natural labor. It's like Campbell canned soup and home cooked chicken soup. One's is more harmonious to the soul.