Stand and Deliver!: And other Brilliant Ways to Give Birth. Emma Mahony

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      Listen to the Hippies, Man

      While my first labour might have got going quicker with a little more intimacy, some of our friends across the pond have been using sex in birth since the 1960s. Ina May Gaskin wrote the first edition of Spiritual Midwifery in 1975, and says in the Introduction, ‘Generally speaking, the more comfortable a woman is living in her body, the more easily she gives birth.’ She was writing at a time of hippie idealism, when a group of around 300 people had come together in San Francisco to tour the country in camper vans until founding a commune in rural Tennessee called The Farm.

      Ina May, after attending the births of women on the road trip, went on to qualify as a midwife and keep records that prove that intense emotional support and trust in the physiological process produce great birth outcomes. There were 11 births on the road before they settled in Tennessee, and today, after 2,028 pregnancies, 95 per cent completed at home and only a 1.4 per cent Caesarean rate (compare that with 30 per cent in some British hospitals), The Farm’s statistics must beat any other birth centre in the world. Here are a few of the more experimental lessons they learned on the way.

      A Kiss on the Lips May Be …

      … all that you need to get you through labour. Believe it or not, there is an extraordinary correlation between a relaxed mouth and a ripe cervix. Not that extraordinary when you consider that a good kissing session probably preceded your current state of falling pregnant in the first place. Ina May Gaskin encouraged the women she attended to practise ‘horse lips’, or blowing raspberries, after discovering a direct link between a relaxed mouth and lips and, well, the labia, or other set of lips we girls have. During one birth on The Farm, a four-year-old girl stood beside her labouring mother demonstrating how to blow better raspberries between contractions. The mother copied her, laughing, and shortly afterwards a new sibling arrived.

      Also effective on the lip front is French kissing your partner (now imagine how that would go down with the starchy midwives on an NHS labour ward). In Spiritual Midwifery, a Farm resident called Marilyn, who had already had two children, describes her home birth:

      Rather quickly, those monumental tidal waves of energy which women on The Farm called ‘rushes’ [contractions] came upon me for the third time. Had I discussed this with Gerald beforehand? I don’t remember. He was reclining next to me, and at the start of a heavy contraction, I found his mouth and we French kissed. Whew! Here comes another! We kissed again, from the start to the finish of the contraction. My mouth must have been opened cavernously wide, because later Gerald told me I nearly sucked the denture out of his teeth. I’m glad he chose to tell me this later. I didn’t need anything inhibiting me while I was testing the midwives’ adage: ‘It’s that loving, sexy vibe that puts the baby in there in the first place, and the same loving, sexy vibe will get the baby out.’ And it did. I didn’t tear with Annie, who weighed six pounds.

      The lips manoeuvre is not something you even need to wait until the birth to try. If you have been with your partner for so long that you often forget to include kissing in your lovemaking any more, try out Marilyn’s denture-sucking French kiss with a view to what’s happening down below at the same time.

      Tits Oot for the Lads

      That loving sexy vibe is not only confined to the mouth. If I told you that in hospital you are often hooked up to an IV drip (which is almost routine procedure in some places) and then given synthetic oxytocin to get your labour started, you wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised. If you now learn that real oxytocin is produced naturally by your body as you start to make love, and is that warm feeling that rushes through you during a heated embrace, then you might be a little more shocked.

      As our own resident High Priestess of Natural Birth, Sheila Kitzinger describes in Birth Your Way:

      For many women the very gentle arousal produced by nipple stimulation, carried out by you or someone else, may produce contractions if continued for 20 minutes or so at a time. Stroke the nipples with your fingers, rolling, sucking or licking them [tricky unless you are a dog], or rest a warm face cloth on your breasts, lifting it off when it cools, dipping it in hot water, and pressing it against the nipples again.

      Sheila also notes that ‘Masturbation will also produce contractions and, because it is possible to have an orgasm very quickly and to experience multiple orgasm with self-stimulation, it may be a more effective method than intercourse in starting off labour.’ Orgasm in a woman produces waves of contractions in the clitoris, vagina and uterus, and opens the cervix. Ho, ho, ho. Even if it doesn’t work, you can at least have fun trying.

      Try Some New Positions

      Good positions to make love in and good positions to birth the baby also have some things in common. For example, the best way for most women to give birth is on their hands and knees, doggy style. Now it is difficult to adopt this position without immediately being transported back to some dubious session with the lights out. Mid-labour with my first baby, when the midwife came in to find me on my hands and knees being massaged by my birth buddy Lisa, I felt she’d opened the door on some porno movie. ‘I think she thinks we’re some sort of lesbian double act,’ I whispered, grabbing the gas and air back off my so-called friend who was sucking away on it. The disapproving midwife left the room, and we both fell about laughing.

      For the lazy among you, unwilling to try new positions and therefore get yourself in the mood to try any position that feels comfortable on the big day, may I offer you the wise words of the obstetrician Professor Roberto Caldeyro Barcia: ‘The only position worse than lying on your back for birth is hanging by your heels from a chandelier.’¹ And there’s another one for you to try.

      I’ll Have What She’s Having

      While no one can promise you an orgasmic birth in your new negligée, there СКАЧАТЬ