Birth

To attend a birth is to be awakened with unimaginable wonder as you begin to rediscover the world with your child. Following conception and pregnancy, birth is the definitive moment that a new life enters fully into the family and community to be blessed and named. It is a precarious passage we have all at one time navigated and may revisit in the agony and ecstasy of birthing our own children. Metaphorically, labor represents a form of “redemptive suffering” as a mother creatively brings a child into light and love, a transition analogous to the salvation and new identity claimed in spiritual “rebirth.” The physiological processes of labor and delivery can be described in terms of the four elements common to the understanding of the natural world by the biblical ancients: the cosmos of water and fire (experienced through labor), (with delivery to) air and earth.

The Wonder of the Elements

During earthquakes, volcanoes, floods and forest fires and no less during a birth, we feel the power and mystery of the elements—their exhilaration and danger. The elements were believed by the ancients to be the essential energy forces that sustained the world. Water, fire, air and earth were seen as vital components of the human body. The maintenance of health was a matter of keeping a balance between them.

The human mind expands in the attempt to overwrite chaos with order by classifying, categorizing and defining the ineffable. Wonder always outgrows our organizing principles and is the essential element we bring to the mysterious and natural event of birth. According to Albert Einstein, experiencing awe “is at the center of true religiousness” (Konner, p. 383). It is wonder, says Oswald Chambers, “that keeps you an eternal child.” Our faith and wonder can be reawakened when we become parents.

While birth is a normal physiological process of which we have only a superficial understanding, it is painful and incurs risks to both mother and child. Mortality, although rare today, has been well documented over the course of history. Isaiah 43:1-2 reassures us at this time: “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze.”

Traditionally cloistered in the privacy of a tent or home and attended by sisters, mothers and midwives, birth is now charted with the technological assistance of modern medicine in hospitals and, more recently, well-equipped birthing centers that offer more family-oriented care. Home deliveries and licensing of midwives have created unfortunate divisions between health care workers but are motivating necessary changes. Controversies arise when the physician’s imperative to intervene on behalf of the unborn child conflicts with a mother’s right to be autonomous in an experience that she wishes to be as positive, private and natural as possible.

Waters of Passage

Water symbolically shares many features with amniotic fluid in the labor process. The fetus swims in a fluid-filled sac that acts as a protective cushion and assists the fetal lungs in their development. When the water “breaks” and the salty fluid gushes or dribbles, there is marked point of no return, a boundary between pregnancy and birth. Literally “the bath is over” and “it’s time to get out!” Although labor pains may not have begun, the breaching of the baby’s sterile environment signals that birth needs to be imminent. Rivers and streams represent boundaries between worlds and countries, the inexorable flowing of time, and are conduits for passage and communication (Isaiah 26:17). Because the fetus drinks and excretes (primarily water) into the amniotic fluid, the characteristics of this bath water communicate important details about the baby’s health. Through examining the fluid for clarity and color, the presence of bile, prematurely passed bowel movements and infection, fetal illness can be detected. Genetic integrity is determined by examining sloughed skin cells present in the amniotic fluid, sampled by an ultrasound-guided abdominal needle.

When the attending physician, in an attempt to initiate or accelerate labor, breaks the waters or enters the womb and sac during cesarean section, it is not unlike a baptismal spring that douses through all layers of emotional protection. It washes the image anew and allows the doctor to see this birth as if it were the first.

With courage and humility, physicians attend a delivery struggling in the currents, weighing all the odds, and waiting with Hypocrites’ words echoing all the way back from the fifth century b.c.: “One must assist nature in effecting the cure. Life is short and the art long. The right time is an instant, the treatment precarious and the crisis grievous.”

The physician strives to achieve balance between being overly impatient, taking the child too soon from the mother, or being indecisive with the resultant danger of allowing the mother to become exhausted or the child to be asphyxiated. Above all, physicians need to be attentive to the patient, tuning their ears to the cries of the laboring mother. As one can be trained to listen only for the oboe out of the whole orchestra, so one may need to strain to hear the voice of the patient in the thin reed of her crying. Tears are shed not just in response to pain but in frustration, helplessness and suffering, sending out a message and cleansing the mind.

Fiery Birth Force

Labor is a baptism not only of water but by fire. The fury and energy of labor is intense and transformative. The rhythmic contracting of the uterus is like the relentless pounding of the surf against the rocks as a storm breaks. The birth force rises, swells as a great wave, peaks and recedes—the tempo ever quickening. Pain can be overwhelming but is mercifully interspaced with pauses of quiet and rest. The intermittent relaxations of the uterus allows blood to perfuse the placenta again. It may be a brief, intense laboring, or it may be a marathon of physical and mental exertion lasting days. Essential is the support of others who focus the mother in purposeful concentration on her own breathing. The perception of distress and pain can be diminished by the neurochemical effects of relaxation.

Physiologically, pain and heat usually warn us of impending danger or harm. Although unpleasant, these sensations have vital protective value. Most, however, would agree hours that turn into days seem to serve little purpose. A woman languishing in prolonged labor tires in her breathing and cannot expect that the mind will forever be master over the body so wrung in pain. Fortunately, modern medicine offers analgesics that are increasingly safer to both mother and child while miraculously maintaining consciousness—humanizing what has been for millennia a time of torturous pain or in the last century “twilight sleep.”

Paul Harvey says, “A father is a person who is forced to endure childbirth without an anesthetic.” Only recently have fathers been welcomed or persuaded to participate in labor support and observe the birth of their children. Having attended prenatal classes, he is equipped to rub the mother’s back and salve her dry mouth, help her focus on breathing and at the pushing stage cheer and encourage her. Even his nervous jokes offer needed levity. Being a warrior and advocate for his wife can mean ensuring the highest care and the clearest communication of her wishes and expectations. The physical presence and touch of her husband can be of inestimable comfort at this time of extremis. In reminding her of the anticipated reward, his vision and optimism can transform her suffering beyond pain into parenthood. Some mothers prefer alternative or additional persons to support them, and some fathers prefer to have the option of leaving the room at any time they feel the need. Very few husbands faint, and most report the event as highly traumatic but worthwhile as they sense the full mystery of their child’s entrance and share those often precious first moments. He has renewed respect for his wife’s strength and is more understanding about her wishes for future children. Inclusion of husbands acknowledges the renewed priority of fathering and exemplifies how men have been liberated to enter into what has historically been a woman’s world.

In some cultures a man may be so sympathetic toward his wife that he can develop an enlarged abdomen during pregnancy (pseudocyesis) and retire to bed while his wife is squatting in labor in the fields. Without experiencing firsthand the tangible bodily metamorphosis during pregnancy, the father has fewer cues with which to anticipate his imminent fatherhood. These cultural idiosyncrasies may impart preparatory wisdom not only to fathers but to modern medicine.

Archaeological evidence of women birthing seated or squatting, even in biblical times (Job 3:11-12, “knees to receive me”), has proven mechanical advantages that are noteworthy considering the increasing rates of interventions such as cesarean section, the use of forceps and episiotomy since the reclining position was adopted as a convenience for physicians. When the mother is seated upright, her pelvic outlet diameter is maximally widened, and the path the baby takes is a smooth “C” shape. Conversely, the inverted “S” course taken in the reclining position often causes the baby’s head to become obstructed against the pubic bone, particularly when the baby starts its journey “posteriorly,” in a more awkward back dive rather than front dive. Gravity in the preferred upright position is solicited as an accomplice. The deliveries a physician dreams of attending are the kind that can occur spontaneously in the dark under a chair. Perhaps physicians can show their versatility and in humility bend down with a flashlight, at least until it is clear that their services are necessary.

In all fairness, the rising rate of intervention is multifactorial. Several generations of medical assistance may have affected the hereditary ability of women to birth naturally. Women who were obstetrically disadvantaged never survived, and neither did their babies. Bad genes died out. Better nutrition, larger babies and the socially encouraged attractiveness of slight women may not be conducive to natural childbirth. Complicating a physician’s judgment is the threat of lawyers who attempt to blame every inexplicable tragedy on a physician’s reluctance to intervene early enough.

Midwives are advocates for self-control in labor and have restored confidence in the body’s resources. Working in a spirit of teamwork like the disparate members of the body of Christ, we should be able to assist birthing women in unity with one another. Most seasoned midwives are aware of their limitations and choose to practice within the hospital setting where vital equipment is available within seconds to minutes in those critical situations when a baby is asphyxiated or a mother is bleeding. Birthing in the private, familiar atmosphere of one’s home with the “guarantee of an intact perineum” is not worth the price of life or health. Nurses, physicians and mid-wives alike need to relinquish disparaging condemnation and join together in the common goal of bringing children into the world in greatest safety, with least intervention and greatest respect to the laboring mother and family. At the root of mistrust is a kernel of truth: technological medicine has lost its humanity. The compassionate physician, who waiting at the bedside centuries ago, unable to do anything but observe, predict, wait and comfort had more respect than the technological wizardry that has immunized whole populations, treated most infections successfully and, through surgery, rescued mothers and babes from death. The current use of epidural and spinal anesthetics allow both parents to participate fully awake in the joyful event of a cesarean delivery of their child. However, the postoperative pain and recovery is an odyssey that requires additional support and compassion transcending technology’s limitations.

Pain intensifies to a state of suffering when it seems to serve no purpose and in that sense has no meaning. Rachel sacrificially died in childbirth (Genesis 35:16-17), naming her surviving child “Son of My Trouble.” Redemptively, his father renamed him “Son of My Right Hand.” Paul reminds us, “We know that the whole of creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth. . . . We . . . groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:22).

Labor pain is naturally one of the most tangible examples of how pain and suffering are translated into creative efforts. As birth tears through a woman cruciform in labor, so we pass in life and in death through a tunnel to light, love and reconciliation. We make an heroic exit through our wounds—birthing not only child, but mother and father, sister and brother. Jesus’ birth has been recalled poetically by R. Paul Stevens:

Remember another watery invasion

incising this peaceless world

with indomitable love.

A child’s cry exegetes Father,

earthed world, birthed maker

glorified flesh. (unpublished, December 1988)

Birth is the supreme effort of a mother to bring a child through water and fire to air and earth. Spiritual rebirth, although natural and intended, is no less miraculous.

Rebirth to Air and Earth

Birth is that moment when the baby enters air and is infused with the breath of life, now belonging fully in blood and body to earth and in spirit to sky. Birth is an awesome mountaintop experience—where heaven and earth meet, symbolizing our communion with God as we are reborn into the divine family because Immanuel (“God with us”) was born into humanity. The child’s first gutsy cry recalls the image of God breathing into red clay our very life (Genesis 2:7). Sometimes when breathing does not occur spontaneously, medical efforts of resuscitation make the child centered in the calm eye of a hurricane of activity. These evocations of breathing are epitomized by the Chinese character for “love”; literally a composite of breathing into one’s heart. “The breath of the Almighty . . . gives him understanding” (Job 32:8). The mind emerges from out of the waters; a babe’s breath is a warm miraculous mist, like a whale’s surfacing, anticipated and celebrated.

Reverence for life is steeped in acknowledgment of the source of our blood and breath: rebirth also involves testimony of the source of our inspiration, direction, life and joy (John 3:3). At the transition of birth, oxygen will now be derived from the baby’s lungs. Through a series of detours, with vessels constricting and opening, blood shared between the baby and placenta is channeled away from the cord and toward the inflating lungs. As the pulsations cease in the three-vesseled cord, it can be clamped and cut painlessly like fingernails or hair. Once a lifeline, this cord of three strands is not easily broken (Eccles. 4:12).

The placenta or afterbirth is the incredible organ that until now has been hidden like the fruitfulness of earth. During pregnancy it allows the fetal and maternal circulation to interface across a selectively permeable membrane. The placenta actively pumps antibodies into the fetal bloodstream, renews fetal blood with oxygen and nutrients, and takes away wastes and carbon dioxide, functioning for the fetus as lungs, kidneys, intestines and immune system. In rebirth, as in birth, we take on new responsibilities, and there is a full actualization of all our potentials that have lain in wait.

Blood and earth share a rich rust color that is the result of the common element of iron. In the red blood cells it is the iron held in hemoglobin that carries oxygen from the lungs to the tissues for use as fuel. The fetal blood circulation contains many “detours” where mixing of used (venous) blood and fresh (arterial) blood occurs. There is less clear distinction between the spent blue blood and the renewed red blood in the fetus as one melds into the other. Soon after birth different paths of circulation are established; the new order of the bloodstream distinguishes clearly between the soiled and the pure. Similarly in rebirth the conscience is awakened and begins actively closing doors on old habits and opening new patterns of flow and relatedness. For example, grounded as we are in our earthiness and granted a renewed sense of the wonder of creation, we may find a new respect for the elements of air and water and the cleansing and healing of the earth (see Stewardship; Ecology).

Throughout the world red has been traditionally used as a sacred color symbolizing mysterious life energy. Bodies were buried in the fetal position in Paleolithic graves, and funeral furnishings were reddened with ocher for a closer resemblance to the womb from which the dead could be born again. Blood has been inextricably linked with healing through the sacrificial blood of atonement shed on Hebraic altars or by shamans cross-culturally. Bloodletting practices were popular in medicine throughout the ages. The life-giving blood of the mother is a hope marked monthly at menstruation. Jesus’ blood given to humankind is remembered at the Eucharist. Rituals are steeped in blood and celebrate the numinous in the ordinary, the hope inherent in death as in life.

The description of the foundling in Ezekiel 16 is a metaphor of the newly birthed and abandoned Jerusalem—cold, wet, bloody and crying. The description suggests that claimed newborns were treated ritualistically much as they are now, usually bathed, dried, rubbed with salt (with antibacterial properties now targeted around the cord stump and as ointment in eyes) and swaddled in comfort, like the enclosing womb left so recently. Even in the early moments the baby receives consolation by nursing away the anxieties of the new world on the breast, an intimate, interpersonal event (see Breast-feeding). Newborns across the planet are welcomed, blessed and named, brought blinking into the light to be beheld and to behold the world. They are also introduced into, and from the start nourished by, the community of the church, especially where they receive strong spiritual and relational sustenance and guidance (see Membership; Godparenting).

The news of a new baby’s arrival travels in great expanding waves through newsprint, phone calls, faxes and e-mail, and across neighbor’s fences passing from person to person in songs of praise. “On the day you were born gravity’s strong pull held you to the earth with the promise” that you belong here with a measurement to boast and the “sun sent up towering flames” to celebrate your arrival in light from dawn till dusk (Frasier, pp. 9, 11).

The seal of the human spirit is wonder, no less apparent on a newborn’s wrinkled face. The human infant for the first few months is unfathomable eyes and ears—actively receptive at this, the dawn of awe. The newborn’s mind has a fine sense of novelty of pattern, favoring symmetry and even beauty. A splash of red on a tie, a shadow on the ceiling or the sound of rain may evoke rapt attention. Newborns within one to two weeks will recognize their parents’ voices. Like a child newly born who has heard parents’ voices long before having seen them, so too in rebirth we have often heard God’s whisperings before the divine Presence is fully and most personally revealed. Often it is the pain and light of fire that brings revelation, a sense of being carried through the waters of affliction.

For some people that sense of birthed wonder diminishes with time, becoming peripheral to everyday life. For some it becomes their central, moment by moment, reason for being—analytically as scientists, contemplatively as artists and worshipfully as children of God and parents of children.

If a child is to keep this inborn sense of wonder, he or she needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering together the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in (Rachel Carson, quoted in Ward, p. 23).

One of the most reassuring concepts in rebirth, as illustrated metaphorically through the physical birth process, is that it is a revelation, refinement and redirection of what is already innate. It is an uncovering and releasing of our inherent good and wonderment despite our persisting shadows, perhaps even clearer now in the daylight. Salvation does not mean we become unrecognizable, perfect or pawnlike. Instead, we discover the source of our true identity with the Creator that began from conception. As part of the community of the church and in the intimacy of our immediate families, God reveals himself palpable as father and mother and Christ as brother. Though ultimately we will be in some way orphaned by our earthly families, this deprivation only draws us homeward, where we are claimed and healed by our Creator.

» See also: Breast-Feeding

» See also: Conception

» See also: Godparenting

» See also: Pregnancy

References and Resources

E. J. Cassell, The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); P. Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn of the Universe (New York: Harper & Row, 1965); D. Fontana, The Secret Language of Symbols (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993); D. Frasier, On the Day You Were Born (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991); P. Harvey, in Promises to Parents calendar (Bloomington, Minn.: Garborg’s Heart and Home, 1990); M. Helewa, “Birth Positions: Historical, Mechanical and Clinical Considerations,” Journal of the Society of Obstetrics and Gynaecology of Canada, May 1992, 47-54; M. Hoffman and J. Ray, Song of the Earth (London: Orion, 1995); M. Konner, “The Tangled Wing” in R. Reynolds and J. Stone, On Doctoring (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991); A. S. Lyons, Medicine: An Illustrated History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1978); J. M. Ward, Motherhood: A Gift of Love (Hong Kong: Running Press, 1991).

—Carol Anderson