January Harshe - Birth Without Fear: The Judgment-Free Guide to Taking Charge of Your Pregnancy, Birth, and Postpartum

Honesty in womanhood and motherhood is what creates a sisterhood.

A birth without fear.

That was the answer.

It was an answer that came to me during nap time. Not my nap time, of course. As a mother of four, my youngest just eleven months old, I wasnt sleeping very much. In fact, I was sleeping so little that I probably should have been trying to catch a few moments of rest as I lay side by side with my snoozing baby girl one late morning in May. Instead my mind was at work.

But they let you? I remembered a friends response when I told her about my most recent birth experience. I was a plus-size, post-due-date, VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean) birthing mama, and pretty much everyone I told about my home birth replied with disbelief. I had to have x, y, and z, they all seemed to say. Otherwise they wouldnt have allowed it. What struck me most about these conversations was how all of the power was with some external authority, not with the mother. Let you? Allow? Had to have?

These words smacked hard against the reality of my recent drug-free home birth experience. I could only describe my labor this time around as peaceful, healing, and even euphoric. My husband, Brandon, described it as the best day of his life.

But I also understood the disbelief my friends and family expressed, for I too had experienced powerlessness during birth. With my first child, a planned birthing center birth with midwives turned into a scheduled cesarean with a high-risk OB/GYN; with my second, a planned VBAC at home, fifty-two hours of labor turned into an emergency cesarean. My third was another planned home birth; this time a VBA2C (vaginal birth after two cesareans) turned into a hospital birth characterized by disrespect, violation, and bullying from the doctor and nurse-midwife.

I wondered what made this sweet babys birth so different from the older three.

The answer came to me in an unexpected instant: Fear was not a factor.

With pregnancy number four, my determination and confidence in my body prevailed. I knew my body could birth a baby the way millions of women had birthed babies before me, and I knew the only person who knew I could do it was me. I had trust and faith in myself and I refused to let all those noisy, anxious doubts and fears disrupt that for me.

You see, in the hospital I always found myself strapped to machines for the nurses and anesthesiologists to monitor while OB/GYNs prepped for cesareans. Hospital billing staff came and went with form after form after form for me to sign. The fear that something might go wrong or, with a vital sign slightly off the average, that something was going wrong guided every decision. If my newborn was not a certain weight or nursing at specific intervals or in this percentile or that percentile, the pediatricians on call panicked. Once home, I felt shell-shocked, out of touch with my body and my voice, and now with the additional task of caring for a brand-new, fragile baby after such frantic experiences.

As my fourth baby lay fast asleep next to me that day, her two fingers acting as a pacifier, I thought back to the moments and hours following this cuddlebugs birth: holding her for many ecstatic moments before giving her my breast; nursing her for a short time as I examined her precious rolls and wrinkles; falling asleep with her in my arms; waking up and handing her to Brandon so I could clean myself up and put on clothes; going to the couch, joyously taking the baby back in my arms to nurse her again; the kids waking up and celebrating the birth of their new sister with ear-to-ear grinseverything just as I had visualized it years earlier when I was pregnant with my first child.

Perfect.

Later that day, as Brandon and I did lots of processing about this babys peaceful birth, the Birth Without Fear community was born. We started by creating a Facebook page. At the time it seemed to be what everyone was doing and we wanted a way to reach as many women as possible as fast as possible. It seemed more effective than shouting from a bullhorn.

We decided on the name Birth Without Fear to celebrate the kinds of birth experiences that empowered moms and families. At the same time, we worried the assumption of fear might be too negativeI knew other women who experienced fear in childbirth, as I did with my first three children, but I didnt know how far it reached beyond my community. How many others struggled with a lack of good information, as I did? How many had experiences where they felt disrespected or judged? Seven years and more than half a million followers later, it is clear we hit a nerve.

I did not have my name attached to Birth Without Fear at first. It was an anonymous place for me to share a lot of information about pregnancy and birth options. So many women I talked to in my own life did not feel they were allowed to have a say in how they birthed. They didnt realize there were options and alternative approaches; or, if they did, they had no clue how to get their hands on the information. There was no place for us to collectively come together as women to share our experiences and information, and to support one another. After a few months, women who joined our community asked to share their own stories, and that is how the blog and website began.