Parenting Excerpts
Volume 2, Number 2

Spiritual Midwifery
By Ina May Gaskin

The following excerpt was reprinted with permission from Book Publishing Company.

How We Started

It was even before we settled in Tennessee that we knew we were going to have to learn how to attend our own births. The original three hundred settlers spent several months accompanying Stephen [Gaskin} on a national lecture tour in 1971, traveling in a caravan of remodeled school buses and vans which were both our homes and our transportation. Several of us were pregnant when we left San Francisco , including myself….We wanted our men to be with us during the whole process of childbirth…and we didn’t want to be separated from our babies after their births. We were already looking for a better way.…

Our first baby was a fine boy, born in his parent’s school bus-camper in the parking lot at Northwestern University – the first birth I had ever seen. Just as Stephen was preparing to go to the lecture hall at Northwestern to address an audience of several hundred people, the baby’s father came over to our bus to ask for Stephen’s assistance at the birth.…Knowing that he had to go ahead with his lecture, I volunteered to help at the birth.

The entire labor and birth lasted only three hours or so. I was no midwife at the time, but I was able to help the mother stay relaxed during this quick labor. I was struck by how beautiful this woman looked while she was laboring. The father actually “caught” the baby, who came out easily and started breathing by himself. There were no complications of any kind with mother or baby. I was in a state of amazement for several days. I had never seen a newborn baby before…and I was struck with how perfect this baby looked, right from the time he took his first breath. I felt a definite calling to be a midwife, but my master’s degree in English had not prepared me for anything so real life as a birth. It was during the second birth on the Caravan that I began to realize more fully the responsibility that goes with being a midwife. I saw that if I made any mistakes, or if I let any mistakes happen in my presence, I was going to have to live with them for the rest of my life. I began to study whatever I could find about pregnancy and childbirth….

The excitement generated by each Caravan birth was contagious. Each mother who gave birth became an inspiring and encouraging example to the other women. We came to look at birth as a sort of initiation or rite of passage – something for which you could gather up your courage with the help of your friends and contemporaries….

As we traveled, we had common experiences and began to know each other better. When each birth took place, we all parked in a sort of protective formation around the bus in which the birth would take place, and everyone waited for the baby’s first cry….

I learned a lot from those first few births I attended on the Caravan. Altogether there were eleven babies born while we were on the road….We finally settled in Tennessee , in the middle of a thousand acres of oak trees….We set about to learn everything we could about safe practices and standards of providing midwifery care for all the people we served….

You can read more about Ina May and The Farm and read lots of amazing birth stories here:

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