Women choose homebirth because they are private and offer minimal intervention in the physiological birth process. This best serves the psychological and emotional health of the mother and baby when she is healthy.
Women need minimal interference, love, patience and a watchful presence when they are giving natural birth. This is the Art of Good Midwifery. Busfare Babies provides the women from Bodium village with just such care.
What I would really like to hear are stories and birth experiences from women on the ground throughout South Africa, so I stopped to interview women from the area. Elsie Joemat, from a settlement near Hoekwil shared her story.
I set off on my road trip to Kwazulunatal after the spectacular birth of Savannah to Tatum and Damien at 22h30 on Sunday evening. Tatum’s mother had given birth to all her children by caesarian section and her sister had also given birth by caesarian section. Tatum was desperate to trade this legacy for one …
For most humans, witnessing someone else’s distress without becoming distressed themselves is quite difficult. We are like babies in a nursery (terrible example), but if one baby cries, soon all the babies are crying. All humans resonate with the emotions of others and it is not easy to remain calm and allow someone else to express their primal fears, or loss, or grief without intervening.
It is interesting for me how the rainbow nation of South Africa is fusing and changing cultures. Now a Xhosa woman may give birth in water, cut her own baby’s cord and give birth in a hospital or birth centre. Birth in the Xhosa culture, is an important rite of passage and is therefore treated with due respect, honour and celebration.
Let us not forget that, as midwives, we are assisting at a most sacred event, the birth of a soul into a human body for a lifetime.