Freebirth and Death

The Shadow-Side of Motherhood

To become a mother is to enter into an intimate, perpetually-present relationship with the heartbreaking possibility of death. 

This is true in a way that is utterly unique to the office of motherhood, and cannot be understood by anyone who has not gestated a child in her womb. Fathers have their own relationship to grief and loss, of course. But it is a singular anguish for a mother whose child has died.

And yet the very moment our baby’s cells begin to differentiate in our bodies, the promise if loss is installed, and the potential for the seeming theft of this overwhelming love—a love that is at once fervent, fanatical, and exquisitely logical—is emblazoned on our hearts. This is an inescapable truth. 

Death is the shadow-side of birth.

Every birth experience, no matter the milieu or the situation, whether at home or in the hospital, whether “natural” or highly technologically mediated, could ostensibly result in death. 

Death, as we all know (at least theoretically and intellectually), is simply a part of life. Although for a woman in the midst of the immediacy of grief following the death of her beloved child, this observation may ring hollow and quite understandably inspire rage and desperation.

Midwives are, in a sense, engaged in a form of community mothering. Given this, the midwife occupies an expanded ambit of death’s sphere of influence. For those women who are called to support mothers in birth, the reality that birth-work is also death-work, is likewise ever-present.

I have been working in the field of birth for over twenty years. I have supported numerous mothers who have lost their babies at varying stages of gestation and in every season of life, from infancy, into childhood and beyond. 

Once, I sat and wept with a mother as she held her perfect, freshly born 22-week (gestational age) sleeping son in the palm of her hand, after the tiny baby was born on her bathroom floor. 

I have held women shattered by the death of their toddlers following iatrogenic harm. 

I have walked with women through the rough country of stillbirth both in the context of freebirth and obstetrician-attended institutional birth with the supposed benefits of all the most high-tech equipment available.

Within my private online community, the Bauhauswife Birth Circle, several women over the five years I have been hosting and leading that space have lost their babies. 

It never gets easier or more familiar to me. And as a mother who has, by the grace of God, never had to survive the death of a child, I still have no idea what it’s like to have my heart broken that way. 

I can only imagine the pain of it, and even in the empathetic imagining, the ache is unbearable.

But I have to believe that in the end, this—birth and life and death in all its forms—is all accorded to us by the grace of God.

To be human is to contend with death. 

And as long as we remain human, the inevitability of death will never be fixed. 

Nonetheless, in our increasingly denatured, disoriented, fractured culture, death is seen as a problem to be solved—a moral failing, even. 

One of the most odious, offensive, and duplicitous lies told about the “freebirth community” (whatever that really means, given the absence of any centralized freebirth “authority,” — unlike the medical industrial complex, freebirth is *not* in fact, a cult), is that freebirth supporters or advocates are somehow in denial about death, or that the reality of death is covered up in the freebirth/natural birth world.  

In my experience, and in the spaces I occupy and cultivate, the opposite is true. Death, and grief, within my “freebirth” circles, are seen, heard, validated, and supported. Imperfectly, yes. Inadequately, I’m sure. Sometimes fearfully, without a doubt. But truthfully, and lovingly.

No mother should ever outlive their child. This, however—agonizingly— is the world of what is, not what should be. 

As I wrote in my book, PORTAL: The Art of Choosing Orgasmic, Pain-Free, Blissful Birth, 

Even mothers—as powerful as we are—do not have the authority to decide the destiny of another person’s life-stream, including that of our children. I do know how devastating and heartbreaking this can be. None of us have the luxury to “manifest” our babies being born alive, or our babies being born with particular features, or the guarantee that our babies will be free from whatever condition or state their own souls have chosen with, or through God, to incarnate into. In the context of birth, motherhood, life, and death, this can be hard to grasp (and hard to swallow) but embracing this concept is one of the keys to freedom from fear. 

I know mothers whose babies have died at home, who are totally at peace with every choice that led to that experience. I know other mothers who’s babies have died in the hospital, and who, a decade or more later, are still not at peace with the choice they made to leave the sanctuary of their homes to enter the hospital. And I know mothers who believe with every fibre of their being that they made the wrong decision in choosing homebirth or freebirth. 

I have worked with many women over the years who have experienced loss, whether in the form of miscarriage or stillbirth, or the loss of the idea they had of their child appearing with certain assumed abilities. Many of these women have shared with me in confidence that, in some capacity, they knew their baby was not destined for this world, or they knew their child would be different. This is not the case for all mothers, but for some it certainly is. We are all soul-beings that have multiple forms of agreements and contracts with God, and none of us are granted omniscience. That is the sole purview of the divine.

To any mother in the throes of grief right now, I send a beam of love.

May you be held by the grace of God and those who love you.