Parenting Excerpts

Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth by Ina May Gaskin

Reprinted with permission from Bantam Books.

The well-documented placebo effect is a notable exception to the medical philosophy that assumes the irrelevance of mind to body. This phenomenon occurs when a person, given a “medication” that is in fact a sugar pill, believes that there is actually some curative agent in the pill. Some people given such pills experience a complete cure of whatever ailed them. In cases like these, the person’s mind is fooled into believing that the body will recover. This belief then precipitates or hastens the actual recovery. A placebo is a way of tricking people into positive thinking. Despite medical culture’s recognition of the placebo effect, orthodox medical theories about labor and birth generally take little notice of the intimate connection between mind and body.

Two of the first ten births I attended taught me how powerful the mind/body connection can be during labor and birth. The first eight women had labors like the ideal described in midwifery or medical textbooks. Contractions began, and the woman’s cervix dilated at a steady rate. However, in two cases, after opening to about seven centimeters (ten centimeters is full dilation), the woman’s cervix remained tightly locked for many hours, no matter how calmly she accepted each rush (contraction). In neither case did the woman’s cervix appear to be any different from those of other women, but clearly each was behaving differently. I wondered why, but my obstetrics text offered no hints as to the possible cause.

In the first case, a visit from a close friend of the laboring woman made a dramatic difference in the course of labor. On being invited into the birth room, she asked, “Has Sheila (the laboring woman) told you about her mother yet?” My body tingled all over on hearing those words. I then learned that the woman in labor had been adopted and had confided to her friend that she had grown up afraid that her biological mother had died in childbirth. She was apparently too embarrassed or too far beyond speech to admit that she was afraid of dying if she surrendered to the power of her labor. Once this profound fear was mentioned aloud, her cervix relaxed and displayed abilities it didn’t seem to possess earlier. It wasn’t long before it was completely open. A healthy baby was born within two hours of the mention of the secret fear. I was quite impressed to know that an unspoken terrible thought could so powerfully alter a woman’s body’s ability to perform a normal physiological function. At the same time, I was delighted to realize that a verbal solution to such a situation could remove any need for medication, mechanical intervention, or surgery.

In the second case, the laboring woman’s cervix had also dilated to seven centimeters and stayed there for more than a day, despite strong rushes. Like the woman mentioned just above, she was having her first baby and was happy about her pregnancy. I was certain that Pamela wasn’t afraid of dying in childbirth, so I was puzzled at her lack of progress for so long. After many hours of unproductive labor, I asked her if anything was worrying her. To my surprise, she answered yes. Her mind kept going back to the wedding vows she and her husband had written for their ceremony several months earlier. She had wanted to include promises about lifetime commitment, whereas he had been reluctant to go that far. As she told me this, I experienced a tingling over my body identical to what I felt upon hearing the other woman’s friend explain about her situation.

Not knowing what else to do, I decided to consult Stephen, my husband, who happened to be a close friend of Pamela. He offered to give the couple a chance to repeat marriage vows that included the “as long as we both shall live” promise. When I asked them if they were willing to do this, they agreed. Between rushes they repeated these more comprehensive vows, and within two hours their healthy son was born.

I have never forgotten these births. My memories of the first several hundred births I attended are especially vivid, and these were among the first I witnessed. One reason they carved so deep a niche in my memory is that these two taught me something extremely precious that I hadn’t realized before. I learned that true words spoken can sometimes relax pelvic muscles by discharging emotions that effectively block further progress in labor.

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