Midwifery is catching

While my brief description for this blog touches on what I am doing here (The blog of someone following her calling to be a midwife - in a peak oil, medicalised, Westernised and traumatised society) I rarely mention peak oil. Rather than trying to convince you that this is the future (you’ll either have to do that yourself, or dismiss me as a bit of a hippy!), let me paint a picture of what it means to me.

Imagine tomorrow oil starts to run out spectacularly quickly. Petrol doubles in price in a month (it’s currently $1.5 ish a L here and people are, rather than changing their habits and downsizing their cars and buying a scooter and insisting on PT being implemented and buying a bike and so on, whinging loudly about the impact it has on their life - and yes I realise that’s inflammatory and that it does have Real Life effects on people who don’t have choices but I’m talking about society as a whole here), food becomes scarce (because much of it is grown across the country or internationally and not processed here) and much more expensive (fertiliser is energy intensive!), postage starts to slow, and society starts to crumble because of the lack of cheap energy.

Have you ever thought about the impact cheap energy has on your life? I won’t go too far into what I am thinking/scared about, but only one aspect - as a midwife and also as a woman with woman-like friends. I see women trying to conceive, or in fact trying not to. The former can take very little effort - sex, well timed or not, will get women pregnant (and while some appear to be self-pollinating, this is not yet a reality ) or a lot of effort as TTC can take a lot of energy in the form of drugs and interventions. So does avoiding pregnancy for the majority - many women I know take a little pill each day to stop ovulation and to avoid pregnancy, or a shot once a quarter, or an implant of the hormonal or physical kind. Very few people I know understand natural processes for watching for fertility, and wouldn’t know the first thing about their cervix or mucous. And before crying "you’re a student so of course you know Way More Than Us" I knew this stuff when I was a teenager, have read widely on the topic and know my cervix quite well TYVM.

As an aside, I was watching Dr Who the other day and the episode I was watching had a future human society using (apparently willing) slaves to do their bidding. The Dr’s companion is rather stereotypically upset about this and The Dr slaps her back to reality by pointing out that in her/our day, the slaves are not in our face - they are in 3rd world countries, earning $1/day or so to sew our garments and make our toothbrushes and farm our food. So next time you buy a jumper or a can of tomatoes, think about where it has come from. Then go and work out how to make your own clothes, grow your own food, disengage from energy slaves, minimise the use of your car or at least celebrate it for a luxury, and consider what your life will be like when peak oil really bites. 

And then there’s the pregnancy. The number of appointments (way above the WHO recommended of 4-5), the embodied use of energy in hospitals and travel there and time spent in waiting rooms… and so on. Then there’s the birth itself - you would be HORRIFIED at just how much rubbish is produced at your average hospital birth. I’m talking two bags of rubbish - none of it recyclable, little of it biodegradable - as well as a bag of linen which needs to be washed.

I’m pondering this more and more because homebirth is so logical, especially when considering this. Gone are the days when each town had a midwife who rode a horse or bike to your house when the time had come, so I’m not quite harking back to the Good Old Days just yet but I am thinking of my practice framed in the future I consider likely. Although - one midwife, one woman was basically how the profession worked back in the day, when midwives were apprenticed and trained that way. Not that technology hasn’t got its place, and hasn’t saved lives, and all of that but:

What happens when power, energy, technology, healthcare and expertise has to be rationalised? When power and water are rationalised so women following a natural life process are not considered high-risk enough to warrant spending resources on them to have them birth on a given day, with pain relief or under a knife, in a hospital, where they then stay for a few days?

What happens when this rationalisation means that women are triaged and managed by a known midwife throughout her whole pregnancy, because we as a society have no choice but to rationalise? What happens when birth has to come out of hospitals and back into the home because of the realities of the future?

Are the assisted reproduction, pain relief, "due date" choices that women birthing today have, a sign of the extravagence that we as a society are indulging in at the peak of our prosperity and moments before the downward slide that has hit EVERY other successful society in the past x thousand of years?

What happens to the rest of society when these changes come? How will women adjust to not having the processes that have become ubiquitous around birth? Where will the lore about pregnancy and birth and menstruations and the moon cycle and fertility come from, when it has been lost almost totally from normal society? How will people adjust to not being able to apply science to intractible infertility, or prematurity, or antenatal screening, or congenital defects?

So - what will I do? What will you do? In just this one aspect - how will you cope with fertility in the future? Are you in touch with your body? Do you require drugs or barrier methods to avoid pregnancy? What will you do when they stop being readily available? How will you access antenatal care if you do fall pregnant? Could you ascertain that you were in fact pregnant, without a stick to pee on?

Would you trust your body enough to birth a babe without technology? 

Some say that The Community is the Solution - I certainly hope so.