Speaker 0
Into the wild, I'm going into the wild, I am. It's been a wild freedom child, since I left my roots back home. Into the wild I'm good. Into the wild I am. It's been a while, freedom child, since I left my roots back home.
Speaker 1
Welcome to the Free Birth Society podcast. This is a radical space for women who are ready to celebrate their autonomous choices in birth, motherhood, and beyond. Together, we'll learn about wild birth through personal narrative, we'll explore the politics of birth, and we'll analyze everything that relates to our lives as women from a feminist perspective. Here's your host, Emilee Saldaya.
Speaker 0
It's been a wild freedom change since I've left my rules back home.
Speaker 2
I am thrilled to be welcoming back to the show my bestie, my birth wife, my cocreator of the Radical Birthkeeper School, the complete guide to free birth, and our soon to be twelve month midwifery school, the Matra Birth Midwifery Institute, Yolanda Norris Clark. She is here today to help me crack open this pervasive myth of hemorrhage and to offer a sovereign resource that is so needed in alignment with what we know to be true of twenty years of birth work. We'll talk about what the word means, what it does not mean, and how we can demystify and, therefore, become unafraid of postpartum bleeding, both as free birthing mothers and as sovereign birthkeepers. This topic is especially relevant as we are currently enrolling for the Radical Birthkeeper School. And one of our core missions through our teachings is to teach the truth about birth and to help you deprogram from the cultural spells cast upon us. Enrollment is open for just a short time more, so don't wait. Join us. Let us blow your minds. Radical birthkeeper school dot com. Alright. Enjoy the episode. Welcome back to the show, Yolanda.
Speaker 1
Hello, Emilee. It is an honor to be here as always.
Speaker 2
Feel like every time you come back, we've got a new baby in the crew.
Speaker 1
Pretty much. You know, every couple years. It's the rhythm.
Speaker 2
That's the rhythm. Love it. Love it. We're calling this episode the free birther's guide to hemorrhage. Our intention today is to create and offer a resource on this big, big topic. It's one of our most, common questions and concerns that that we receive. Yeah. And it's a really big deal because it is such a big story. And so many women are walking with the story that they are bleeders, that they've hemorrhaged, that they almost died, and it's just a really big conversation. So we know there are not many or any, resources out there on this topic from a sovereign perspective, from a physiological perspective, from a nonmedical perspective. And so, yeah, excited. Long overdue. Excited to create this. Anything you wanna add?
Speaker 1
No. That sounds great. I'm excited to be here.
Speaker 2
So I guess the first thing I wanna do is is throw you the question, how did you survive this most recent birth? You're forty three, I believe. You've had so many children. Isn't it so dangerous?
Speaker 1
I'm just really lucky. I'm really lucky, Emilee. And, Yeah. Yeah. The more babies I have, the older I get, the more I get concern trolled. That is the more perfect strangers feel empowered and justified in telling me how unreasonable I am, how irresponsible I am, how crazy I am, really to think that this time, I'm gonna get away with it. Right? I I hear very frequently, again, from perfect strangers, how lucky I am to have survived birth as many times as I have, as though giving birth is somehow a much riskier near death experience than any other aspect of life, which it's absolutely not. I mean, I genuinely feel orders of magnitude safer giving birth than I do driving in a vehicle anywhere. And, really, the idea that birth would ever be categorized as as this big risk, that we take in life is really just not part of my reality. So this time leading up to the birth of our baby Margaret, who's two months old now, I was forty two years old at the time. Now I'm forty three. But this time I, I, during Margaret's pregnancy, I encountered more of this concern trolling than ever before. And you know, the truth is, and you know, this better than anyone I actually love, I love bearing witness to the willing ignorance and the small mindedness and the stupidity of other people because then I get to feel so superior and so enlightened and, you know, that's totally disgusting dynamic and it's very much an aspect of of my shadow. But underneath all of my dark delight, you know, my dark reflexive delight in in that, there's actually something really interesting going on there in the stories that people have about what it means to be a woman in her forties who dares to simply be human. Because for me, at this point in my life, there's a real fluidity to the way that I'm open to experiencing my body and especially what it is to be a woman and especially the transmission that is pregnancy and birth. You know, I've got a lot of my own major issues, but but I'm I'm pretty open to the process of life, I think. You know? I think that's one of my my areas of, anyway, comfort. Right? And I definitely freak out about certain things like, you know, bureaucracy and folding towels and missing jar lids. I take irrelevant things way too seriously. It's not as though I've figured anything out really. But when it comes to being in my body and being a woman, being a mother, I'm I'm pretty relaxed about it. And I find it quite fascinating to allow other people's responses to that, reveal the collective cultural conditioning and the collective cultural preoccupations. And one of those preoccupations is hemorrhage, or the favorite I I heard this a lot, and it's I think it's, what's the word? Dysphemism, bleeding out. So I I'd actually just learned the word dysphemism. It it's the opposite of a euphemism. So instead of a phrase or a term that is used to soften a brutal reality, which we encounter all the time within the obstetric complex. Right? Like calling the amputation of the end of a baby's, genitals circumcision or or, or describing the the physical assault done on postpartum women's uterus as fundal massage. Those are euphemisms. Right? But free birth trolls really love to use dysphemism to attempt to frighten and intimidate. And I've received countless comments and private messages from people who will say things like, I'll bet you'll change your attitude towards the hospital when you're bleeding out, which is likely because you're so old and you've had so many kids, you know, bleeding out is like this term that people really like to use. So apart from Yeah. It I mean, it's intended to be. Right?
Speaker 2
Or it's
Speaker 1
it's that's that's the intention behind that that spell. And it's a pretty, there's there's an element of of of really hateful preemptive schadenfreude that these people are are already ideating. But what's clearly present there as well for many is is really the true belief that being a more mature mother and having had a number of children already actually dramatically increases one's likelihood of bleeding excessively or experiencing hemorrhage or bleeding out. And I actually don't think that that's true at all. But I do think that the institution of inst industrial obstetrics, which, of course, includes medical midwifery, makes this true by design. So you and I, Emilee, are gonna get into a little bit of that a a little bit later, but I wanna wrap this up by saying that, not only did I not bleed out after the birth of Margaret, who is my tenth baby, who incidentally was born after one single hour of absolutely blissful, totally pleasurable, incredibly peaceful sensations. And I was almost entirely alone except for my husband who was on the other side of the room trying and failing, let's be honest, to take decent video of the birth. So that's fine. That's okay. It's not his genius or his job. His job really is to protect our children and to protect me, and he does that very, very well by protecting the perimeter, especially during my birth. And and he knows deeply what birth requires. Lee trusts me and my authority during the birth process. And because I understand birth and I know what's actually needed, not only for any birth really to stay safe, but for a birth to be as blissful as it's designed to be. My baby Margaret emerged after one hour. And during the immediate postpartum period, I was very, very shaky and pale and I felt very destabilized postpartum as I often do, as is totally normal in my experience for birthing women. But, actually, I was really surprised as well to see that not only did I not bleed out, but I bled far less during Margaret's birth, my tenth birth at age forty two, than I had during any of my previous birth experiences. I was actually a little bit shocked, really, to see how little blood I lost. Oh, and I wanna mention too that, way back when I was pregnant with my first baby, I actually had a blood screening test done. And this was one of the last very last times that I had anything to do with with diagnostics in the system or really the medical system at all. And and and the reason why one of the reasons that I that I disconnected myself from that system was this experience of having had this blood test and then being told that I had low platelets and that I was at particular risk of postpartum hemorrhage. And that was actually really important experience in my life because hearing this news was just so immediately ridiculous to me and so laughable to me that it actually contributed to my realization that the industrial medical model really had nothing to offer me. Again, it it was not just not at all resonant for me that I had this supposed problem and this high risk of bleeding, and so I just completely rejected it and carried on with my life. Now during my most recent pregnancy with Margaret, I was very, very fit and very healthy. I ate really well. But again, the fact that I hardly bled at all was was still quite quite interesting to me. But what I also know after twenty years of witnessing births and supporting women in birth outside the system is that postpartum bleeding is also totally normal. Right? Like, it's it's not wrong or bad. It doesn't necessarily need to be scary. And there are some very convoluted, contradictory, really messed up ways that we have come to understand or or misunderstand postpartum bleeding and blood loss and the idea of what hemorrhage is and what it is not and how we define hemorrhage. And I think this is just a result, again, of of the many distortions in our understanding of how birth works and how healing works and how our bodies work fundamentally. So
Speaker 2
I just wanna plug that one of your book titles in the future should definitely be called dark reflexive delight. Something needs to be named that in dark, reflexive delight. He just, like, casually threw that amazing phrase out.
Speaker 1
Oh, dear.
Speaker 2
Yeah. I remember you texting me postpartum being like, it's really interesting. There is no blood.
Speaker 1
There's really hardly any blood. Yeah.
Speaker 2
So let's shift into yeah. I think that was a good segue into into the overview. You know, part of what we wanna get into is a bit of myth busting, some of what we've really come to understand in sovereign birth work and being leaders of, you know, our communities where we are both tracking so many sovereign birth stories. And I want to, yeah, name and and untangle a bit, you know, some of the common, like, the the common consciousness around hemorrhage that many women are walking with. Many women are, you know, whispered while they're drugged up, you know, and and and in these really vulnerable positions. And then they walk away holding these stories that have no real basis in reality. And yet it it it will be the story that keeps them tethered to a system that they don't actually wanna go back to. So that that's something, I mean, we both both of us see so frequently. And so many of our birth trauma debrief sessions are quite specific to unpacking these stories around I hemorrhaged. I had retained placenta and almost died. You know, these are stories I hear regularly. And one hundred percent of the time, so far, when we unpack them, one hundred percent of the time Mhmm. It's either glaringly obvious that it was entirely manufactured by the medical providers, the pharmaceuticals, and the abuse that the woman experienced, or the woman had a, I would say, a what's the right word? Just a misunderstanding of what a hemorrhage is. And in fact, she just had some blood.
Speaker 1
And like a normal birth, actually.
Speaker 2
And had a normal birth. Yeah. Right. And this is where it gets complicated because, you know, when when we as a society believe that women are flawed and broken and incapable, and then we carry that in a million different ways in our own psyche, we then look for unconsciously how that can be true. That is a really interesting part of birth trauma debriefs or or just listening to women's stories in general. I'll hear these completely normal stories, and they're told so dramatically as if I'm going to be, like, aghast that a birth was six days long and that the baby come out and came out and took five minutes to take a breath and that the baby you know, blah blah blah. And I'm like, okay. So where's the part that's interesting? Like, I haven't I haven't heard anything other than a mammal had a baby.
Speaker 1
It is so interesting, and it's it'll it's also it also reveals that the trauma that these women carry, which is very real, is not a trauma that actually is a result of their physiological experience of birth. It's rather a trauma that has been absorbed as a result of the projection of this cultural misunderstanding. Right? These stories that that women come, you know, that are carrying, that they have kind of that they experience as trauma. It's not, yeah, it's it it really is a testament to the power of this cultural projection. And, actually, before this conversation, I actually googled the mainstream medical definition of both hemorrhage in general and postpartum hemorrhage specifically, and I found the results really, really interesting. So the word hemorrhage comes from Greek or Latin or or maybe both, and it actually literally means to bleed violently. But every definition that I found on Google, like, just the first things that came up that are all, you know, medical norms, according to the medical complex, hemorrhage actually means any form of bleeding from a damaged blood vessel. And I actually didn't realize this until now. I always thought that the term hemorrhage implied a distinction involving some form of acute trauma with symptoms that involved, you know, an alteration in vital signs or the loss of consciousness or or threatened loss of consciousness. I actually thought that hemorrhage actually meant something. But apparently, in the medical system, hemorrhage just means blood loss. So, you know, it's gonna be really hard for me not to announce that we have a hemorrhage situation the next time one of my kids scrapes their knee. But I will resist that temptation because I know how powerful words are, and I know that speaking anything out loud is a form of spell casting. And this is all really, really important because what you and I both know, Emilee, is that the term postpartum hemorrhage is used specifically to cast a fear spell and a pathology spell and a helplessness spell over women, and it really works. So this relates so much to these stories that that we that you and I both receive in in our birth trauma debriefs where women will describe their experiences of having hemorrhaged, and then they actually tell us what happened in their birth. And it's like, oh, either you didn't hemorrhage at all as as you just pointed out. You had a completely normal birth, or the bleeding that you experienced that might have been more more so than you would have liked given the context that the woman will then explain about how her birth went down, those sorts of situations inevitably, in my experience anyway, involve interference and sabotage and ways in which her birth was, yeah, really altered by the presence of people who whose whose, involvement in the birth was really counterproductive.
Speaker 2
Yeah. I appreciate you saying that about the definition because as you were talking, I was thinking, well, what would my definition be and how do I teach about it? And when I really get when I really get clear, you know, I I always say, you know, it's not just blood loss. It's the combination of how you feel and blood loss, but it's more than that. It's I think the word I would use is it's unresolved. Like, it it's it's it's not resolving itself, and the mother would be declining. And what that literally means would be signs of shock, and this is beyond and this is where we wanna be really clear about this because some signs of shock are not uncommon for a postpartum woman. So if we were to say things like pale color, shakiness, even some dizziness, and then some blood loss, you know, even a woman fainting when she tries to get up. Yeah. There there's there's things in the wheel of normal postpartum that that feel yeah. That are very normal, that that I hear all the time, that I've seen a ton. And where is this conversation when it goes into unresolved? And and that's actually an incredibly subjective track to follow because you can only work it backwards. I'm sorry if this is confusing, but let's frame it this way. Yo and I both have never ever ever ever ever attended a birth, a physiological birth at home, a sovereign birth, where there was no medical providers. Neither of us have ever seen what either of us would call a hemorrhage. But to be really clear, that doesn't mean we haven't seen blood loss. It doesn't mean we haven't seen women faint or not feel good or take many, many weeks to replenish themselves. You know, that's something I'm thinking of is some women will walk with the story that they hemorrhaged because they felt really drained and exhausted and weak for weeks. But, okay, I'd also would just call that a very normal postpartum experience. There's so much recovery and and replenishing, you know, occurring in postpartum. And so I think, you know, as you and I are with these topics, we wanna get into some of the nuances here because there isn't it's not true what the medical system, what your medical midwives are all saying, that this amount of liters of blood loss is hemorrhage. And when this amount of blood loss shows up on the towel and you weigh the Chucks pads, that's hemorrhage, and that justifies injecting the mother's body with harmful pharmaceuticals or shoving pharmaceuticals up her rectum, you know, without her consent or knowledge and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. You know, even a woman transferring because she doesn't feel good and receiving a transfusion, a blood transfusion doesn't mean necessarily anything because they love to do that. So, yeah, I I I'm it's like we're we don't have a black and white guide because it's not like that. And the more that I'm thinking about your definition off of Google, again, we've never seen this in sovereign birth. I've certainly seen it manufactured in the system, which we'll get to later, but we have not seen of seen and and I don't think we've actually also ever heard of any convincing story in a sovereign birth dynamic that either of us would truly give a label of hemorrhage, which begs the question, then what would that be?
Speaker 1
Mhmm.
Speaker 2
Right? And I I guess what it would be would would mirror what I've seen in the hospital, which would be blood it doesn't have to be a faucet. Let's just say blood loss, and the woman is not recovering. She is losing consciousness. She has slurred speech. She is disengaging from physical reality and from her baby. She's, you know, unable to do eye contact. She's leaving her body
Speaker 1
Mhmm.
Speaker 2
And there is significant blood loss.
Speaker 1
Yep. Yeah. I mean, I I actually wonder if the term hemorrhage should really be used in the context of natural birth or truly physiological birth. I mean, I have personally, as you just mentioned, and and I know this is true for you too, I've never seen in my experience of birth and attending women's births what I would call a hemorrhage. I've only rarely ever seen bleeding that was concerning to me, although I have, and that was all you know, we handled all of that at home without needing to transfer. Not not I mean, in the moment, I've I've been in experiences that have, yeah, caused me concern, and and I have felt activated and and compelled to to offer the woman various forms of support, but it was all resolvable at home. But when we consider that the allopathic definition of postpartum hemorrhage is excessive bleeding following the birth of the baby, Again, you know, what does that mean? Even the the most mainstream websites, as I said, note that hemorrhage is more likely to occur in the case of surgical birth, obviously. You know, that makes so much sense because the surgical birth is an experience during the during which the mother is being injured. Right? And, yes, sometimes, very rarely, but sometimes that injury is preventative. It's it's maybe necessary to undergo the injury of surgery to save the life of a mother or baby. But given, of course, that in many places, surgical birth makes up fifty, sixty, sometimes seventy or more percent of all births. We know beyond the shadow of doubt that most surgical births are not actually medically necessary or life saving. So that means that women are being put in a position of of a high risk for a real hemorrhage because they're being given surgical births unnecessarily. And it's interesting to me too that that over the course of the the many years that I've been in the birth world, the elder midwives that I respect the most, who have the most experience in what I suspect, at least, somewhat aligns with the kind of philosophy that that you and I espouse. I'm thinking of women like Gloria Lamay and Gail Hart, Joy Jones, Sister Morningstar. They have always tended to say that their belief is that, a rate of surgical births that reflect medical necessity would be around one percent maybe. Right? And I wonder if that's even a high a high percentage. But when it comes to hemorrhage statistics, all of those statistics are collected in the context of industrial birth, and that, of course, includes what we think of as industrial home birth, You know, home birth that's attended by practitioners who've been trained within the institution to view birth as a pathology and as a potential problem, and and birth situations where they are the self appointed superheroes, you know, where they're present, with the belief that they're there to save a woman from death. So so that says a lot just about hemorrhage statistics as well and and surgical birth statistics too. But in a way, it actually doesn't matter that birth isn't constitutionally a wounding or a pathology because belief is reality creation. You know, the world really is what we think it is, and the body is what we think it is. And belief is expressed and reinforced through this continuous spell casting, word spells that actually bring the theme of deterioration and damage in the case of hemorrhage into being. You know, it begins in the realm of the imaginary. And it this affects women's consciousness, of course, but it's also a reflection of the consciousness of medical practitioners who are really just enforcers of an ideology. So medical practitioners have been force fed this overall concept of pregnancy being pathological and of birth being punitive and destructive and damaging and dangerous. And therefore, we've metabolized this notion that the release of postpartum blood is the same as the very dangerous bleeding that results from an injury as a result of damage that's been done to a blood vessel, which again is like the the definition of post of of hemorrhage. But really what's occurring when a woman gives birth in a normal way or in a vaguely normal way even usually is that she's releasing stored blood. You know, that's really what it is. It's it's it's like menstruation or or or a parallel to menstruation. Right? And most women are, most women who are lucky enough to experience a normal birth experience, which is actually pretty rare. You know, I'm talking about normal from from my perspective. I don't even know if if if it's I don't even know if we're really bleeding postpartum. I I I think we're more sort of releasing the excess blood that our bodies no longer require. So even if the technical definition of hemorrhage is bleeding, It's a powerful word spell to use the term hemorrhage to indicate this very normal bleeding. So what we have really is a situation where, again, all of this comes back to and this this conversation around hemorrhage, but also so many other, conversations that involve variations of normal, high risk situations supposedly and and emergencies. It really comes down to our understanding of what birth is and how birth works. There are so many contradictions and so many discrepancies in the way that we understand birth. If you're coming from a certain perspective or certain belief system, your your understanding of birth is gonna be very, very different from women like us who are immersed in the world of of wild birth because birth itself is not inherently traumatic, either physiologically or psychologically. However, when trauma occurs during birth, whether that's physical or psychological trauma, this is the evidence of externally imposed harm or abuse, I think. And I would absolutely argue that to some extent, every woman alive today is experiencing the consequences of having been victimized by, at the very least, psychological abuse that is inflicted on the part of the medical upset obstetric complex via the psychological engineering that's done through the media, through ancestral imprints. And it is trauma, whether, again, it's physical trauma or energetic trauma or psychological trauma that is at the root cause of situations that involve excessive bleeding to the point of death being a significant risk. Right? So one of the questions that that I know that we both get all the time is, you know, you free birth people, Why won't you acknowledge or will you acknowledge that emergencies can sometimes happen at a birth as though we're somehow in denial that, yeah, things can go go wrong or there can be a number of variations of normal. Right? But what I overwhelmingly observe, and I know this is true for you as well, is actually that things go wrong during births all the time in the context of interference and sabotage. And that's not just interference and sabotage within the institution. This is interference and sabotage that is often inflicted unwittingly by midwives, doulas, birthkeepers of every kind, really, and even by well meaning family members and partners. But there's also quite a significant burden of energetic and psychological interference and sabotage that we as women can bring into our experience that I think can also contribute to things not happening as easily as they might.
Speaker 2
Yeah. And really almost almost no one is teaching about birth with years of witnessing with their own eyes, through their own lived experience, true sovereign undisturbed birth. And so we're caught in this cycle where well meaning birth educators who are also traumatized, who don't know anything about physiological birth, but they think they do because they read a book or took a course, are just repurposing their programming. You know, so many educators and and coaches and women well meaning women unpacking other women's births don't understand anything about physiological birth because you can't understand it just intellectually through a book. You have the amount of deprogramming that is required to contend contend with these stories that live within all of us, I'll I guess I'll speak for myself, has just it's it's really only happened in attending, attending, attending, attending, attending, feeling fear about about, you know, moms telling me they're bleeders. And and then I go to that birth and and it's in the back of my mind. Like, I hope this isn't the one. I hope this isn't the birth, you know? And then it it isn't. It isn't. It isn't. The story you know, the truth about birth and the truth about the protective nature of birth continually is what has taught me or or or led me to have in what I guess I would call, like, integrative deprogramming. Yeah. So, you know, we were gonna give this overview of what it really is, and it's like, what really is it? You know? The the a a word that comes up for me a lot when I talk about it and help women frame it is dysregulation. That's a word that comes up, you know, a lot in in how I speak about it. So to me, it makes sense that the body, and the psyche, after it's gone through just a totally average, hospital birth, which I I guess maybe it's worth for anyone who doesn't know, like, spelling that out for a second, you know, going through the humiliation rituals, being naked with legs, you know, splayed open in stirrups with many people staring at her, a light out of the ceiling, you know, shining on her vulva, hands inside of her, you know, really treated largely like a headless body. She's on drugs. She's on, you know, she's on an epidural, and that cocktail is local anesthetic and narcotics. Right? So women are giving birth on fentanyl, which is a hardcore disassociating, you know, drug. And so she's high, and she's on her back. She's being sexually assaulted, and the baby is pulled out, and then the baby is cut from her. And so now the placenta was about to do its its job, giving the baby its physiological blood transfusion, and it doesn't get to do that. And now the mom is separated from the baby. The baby's out of sight. She's drugged up on her back. You know, now strangers are are with her baby. No one's speaking to the mother. There's a stranger in a mask and gloves, you know, at her vulva, you know, beginning to to stitch or to go deep inside of her to retrieve the placenta. And and now, you know, the IV starts with the pitocin. It was probably already on. And just wow. Like, that that's a totally average hospital birth. That's not even that's not even, like, in the realms of the crazy shit we hear. That's just, like, that's just what happens. So in that and then the fungal abuse, you know, begins and the mom's writhing in pain. And so they give her more fentanyl and and it's just so incredibly gnarly. And so in that, you know, when you imagine that scene or, you know, unfortunately, many of you are gonna hear that and put yourself right back to that memory because you've experienced that exact, you know, story. It would make sense to me that the body would become so dysregulated by that level of torture, abuse, and and drugs that it wouldn't be able, let's say, to regulate the proper job of what the womb and the placenta are now designed to do. So I say this kind of delicately because on the one hand, like with so many of these things, on the one hand, I don't believe that it is hemorrhage most of the time if we're going to define hemorrhage in this conversation as an unresolved condition that would, likely lead to death. Right? The bleeding out phrase. Okay? We'll never know. Right? Because they never the women in the system never get the chance to have, loving care and to get regulated. So then we have to, you know, travel over to our sovereign birth experience where regulating at home is is what you do. Like, that a hospital is is is, of course, a very last resort. And where we're standing and the other, you know, attendants we know who who support this way, we're looking over here in our birth practice, and we're like, oh, that's interesting. All of us resolve with the families and regulate at home. Well, that's so interesting because then we talk to medical midwives, and they say things like, you know, I see three hemorrhages a month. And then I, as a doula in the system, you know, saw air quotes, hemorrhage almost every time I went to a birth in the system. Now this is you know, I hope you guys are following us that it's like, what is it? You know? Of course, things are being manufactured, but then, also, women aren't even given the chance to resolve in any sort of holistic, normal, humane way. I do think many of the the circumstances where it's called hemorrhage, is bullshit. And, also, if anything was going to cause severe dysregulation, it's it's the scene I just described. Right? Of course. I mean, what would dysregulate, a new mother more than being drugged and and disconnected from her baby and being abused for hours and then having people physically jump on top of her swollen, you know, womb that just gave birth, you know, after being sexually assaulted. Like, this is very real. This is this is crazy. And so if there was gonna be dysregulation, that makes sense to me that that would be, very hard for the body to keep up with. And yet I do think most of them do.
Speaker 1
Yep. Yep. I think there's also another important dynamic to point out here, and that is that I think a lot of midwives have been taught how to justify their own existence by claiming hemorrhage or naming a relatively normal postpartum experience as hemorrhage so that they can, yeah, as I just said, justify their their presence at a birth. And and, again, I don't think this is a this is not nefarious. It's not conscious. It's part of how the dynamic is set up. It's part of the the hazing process of undergoing medical midwifery training. They need to be needed. It's a it's a heroic, venture to become, an industrial midwife.
Speaker 2
Well and the the rules and regulations, the standard rules and regulations of third stage management are important to understand here with medical midwifery because medical midwives are trained and and choose to believe that they're required to interrupt a physiological third stage. So women birthing with medical midwives, you you know, you can be in your bed, you could be in your bathtub, doesn't matter. You are going to have really dangerous disruption. And and third stage is the birth of the placenta. And so what that means is baby comes out and they are required to begin vigorous rubbing of baby. They are required to suction baby or maybe they're just gonna practice because they just took that course, you know, to re up their certification. And, maybe they'll bag your baby, you know, because they're just practicing and then they're going to, give you a shot of Pitocin whether you like it or not. And, oof, if I had a dollar for how many stories I hear of women saying, well, my midwife won't do that. My midwife, she carries it just in case, but she doesn't just use Pitocin. Like, she's willing to betray her license. Like, she even listens to your podcast. I'm like, uh-huh. Okay. Well, best of luck with that. And then six months later, we're doing a birth trauma debrief, and she's like
Speaker 1
Mhmm.
Speaker 2
She did exactly what you said.
Speaker 1
Yeah.
Speaker 2
So it's because you matter way less than her license. Hello. This is why she chose it. Anyway, Thursday's active management. Yeah. Shot a pit, vigorous rubbing, getting that as involved as they want. And then, yeah, maybe they keep the cord connected versus in the hospital, they cut it. That might be the only, like, redeeming thing. And then I feel like I'm missing something. Oh, and then getting the placenta out. So the Pitocin, not really optional. And then just like at the hospital, you're either going to have manual removal, where they go in elbow deep and scrape the placenta out of you, or, they will do that with a combination of the fundal abuse that we described earlier. And so exact same situation as a hospital, it really might be the case that after all of that horrific disruption, your body doesn't regulate very well. Now it also might be the other option where you are absolutely fine, but the midwife knows nothing about physiological birth and doesn't know how to support you in resolving. And so, again, this is where it blows my mind. The cognitive dissonance of our culture of of of women saying they want a natural birth and then hiring a medical provider.
Speaker 1
Mhmm.
Speaker 2
You know? And I know it's like because they just don't freaking know. But a lot of women do actually know because they listen to this podcast and they think they found the unicorn. And, you know, my friends, there are no unicorns. There just are no unicorns. There are only women who attend birth in integrity. And if you have a license, I don't trust you. How how can you? You know, how are you trustworthy if you choose to be a state owned agent that agrees to disrupt one of the most vulnerable aspects of keeping a birth safe, which is third stage, you know, the delivery of the placenta. So blah. Okay. So, you know, I also wanted to name in this episode, you know, that we all carry this spell that has been casted on us multi generations that our grandmothers or great grandmothers, there's this, like, ambiguous time at our backs over our shoulder where women were dying and bleeding out left and right from hemorrhage, and it is so clear. It's just so, like, accepted, and we all know it deep in our in our psyche that the only reason we've stopped dying is that medical providers have some sort of fairy dust that they sprinkle on us and now we're surviving, except of course for the women in the hospital who aren't surviving. No one talks about them. No one talks about the amount of women in North America who are dying on surgical tables from hemorrhage. No one talks about that because there is this really powerful hold of the narrative, the cultural narrative that somehow medical providers sprinkle something special to keep us alive and to keep us safe from this really dangerous biological act that all mammals do. And seemingly, all the other mammals do pretty well with it. But we're this really special, you know, it's because we we, start walking, you know, so early. But it's like there's all these, like, interesting, like, our hips just aren't wide enough and, you know, we have all these unique reasons why we are the dying species that needs the special fairy dust, which I guess we would call Pitocin.
Speaker 1
Mhmm. Mhmm. I love sister Morningstar's amazing imagery. She talks about, you know, the fact that it's just so mysterious that we don't come across mother deer in the forest surrounded by blood with their babies dead beside them because they can't nurse because the mother has died of postpartum hemorrhage.
Speaker 2
Yeah. No. The animals can do it. It's it's just it's just us. And and so then and, of course, what's so exciting about this study we're gonna do, you know, and but but just through our own lived experience, like, well, where where are all of these mothers in the sovereign birth world bleeding out and dying? Where are they? I don't know of any of them. Now that's not to say it doesn't exist. I have no idea. I can only speak from what I know to be true. But for from what I know to be true, I have never once, not one time, seen or heard of a situation where a mother died for from any complications at home, but but specifically we're talking about
Speaker 1
Mhmm.
Speaker 2
About blood loss. Yeah. So
Speaker 1
Yep. I wanna mention something else too. There's sort of another element to all of this that I've been thinking about a lot lately. As you know, I've been studying holistic health and self healing for many years, and I'm gonna be at the matriarch rising festival meeting workshop Hey. On self healing and supporting child and family health for for mothers and and sharing my own approach to supporting the resolution of of our healing cycles. And my my approach is grounded in many ways by the work of the late German doctor, Rike Geert Hamer, who observed and documented what he called the five biological laws, which I call the Germanic healing framework. And what I find especially fascinating about postpartum hemorrhage or this idea of postpartum hemorrhage or bleeding postpartum is that bleeding, in general, involves blood vessels, and postpartum bleeding involves the uterine muscle. And the process of involution of the uterus during the immediate postpartum period. And according to Hamer's framework, any issue involving the muscular structure or the vascular smooth muscle system of the body is related to what he called a biological conflict involving self devaluation. And what I've noticed in the stories that I've received from others over the years who've experienced what they describe as postpartum hemorrhage, whether or not this, you know, aligns with with my personal definition of of what hemorrhage is or should be, which again would involve uncontrollable bleeding and and what you described so well as as sort of just perpetual, persistent dysregulation on a series of symptoms that, you know, would indicate a true threat to her survival. But, anyway, weighting of of whatever kind that that verges on excessive, what many of these women share when they really start to unpack their stories is that they have inadvertently or unconsciously created birth situations that involve a significant degree of both fear and lack. So lack of really truly nourishing resources, lack of support, lack of trust, lack of confidence, the, insertion of of the presence of of medical professionals who are actually not there to serve the woman's best interest. Right? And every single story I've encountered of this kind that involves the story of hemorrhage, incorporates self devaluation on some level. And this includes the experiences that I've personally had, when I've witnessed and supported the births of women who have experienced not what I would call uncomfortable and has inspired me to, you know, take action to support the woman specifically in allowing her body to calibrate. So, yeah, there's just such an interesting, emotional and energetic component that I think we don't really take into account because, what's happening in the hospital and what's happening in these industrial home birth situations is not just actions taken on the part of providers, so called providers, that are are encouraging or precipitating more blood loss than is necessary. But it's also the atmosphere of fear and all of the choices that the mother made leading up to this experience where she ends up really being completely unsupported and, and, and experiencing an expression of a lack of self value and self love in the way that her body is responding to birth and motherhood. Right? I mean, these are profound, really, like, deeply held themes that show up again and again in our culture as women and as mothers.
Speaker 2
And zooming out, like, how many how many women have we supported do we know that are in our communities that have been our clients who walk with the story I hemorrhaged, who, you know, feel like they have lots of proof of that in their industrial births, and then they free birth and bleed the perfect amount. It's like, oh, that's so interesting that you just magically you just magically didn't hemorrhage all of a sudden when you did what you wanted and weren't brutalized in your birth. Like, it's so it's so unsurprising. And and I think I'd like to I wanna touch on the the walking with the story piece, and then let's end with as sovereign birth workers. You've mentioned a couple of times if a woman's bleeding so much that you do feel a little uncomfortable, how do we, how does one support a woman to resolve? I think we should definitely name some some, you know, real, steps there. But before we do that, I just wanna name how frequent in both of our coaching practices women tell us these stories that all essentially have this gaslighting, messaging to the woman, which is well, let me back up. It's like this. I had retained placenta, and and I almost died. Or, you know, in my last birth, I hemorrhaged. Or I'm coming to you because I've had three hemorrhages with my three births, but I don't wanna go back, and so how do I prevent hemorrhage? Right? So so the women come with these big, big, big stories. I mean, women really believing that and having been told and then believing that they almost died. I mean, that's that's really big. That is really scary. That's almost enough, you could say, to keep someone tethered to the system. So these brave women are coming forward, basically getting interested in in in talking with us about how we could, explore that that story. So the common denominator is that medical providers in various creative ways are letting women know postpartum You just didn't realize how close you were to death. I have so many women tell me, well, the thing is I I felt fine, but my midwife said that you can feel fine and still just die. And so these women are so, so deeply gaslit in this really precious time in our brains. You know, what's going on postpartum? What's going on during birth? It's so precious. It's so vulnerable. Oh my goodness. And you're you're you're in really a a not everyone maybe. I mean, with a lot of disruption, maybe not. But you're supposed to be the design is that you're set up to be in a state of hypnosis. So you are very easily influenced. These stories can get really deep in your subconscious when someone is casting a spell, as Yo says, in a state of hypnosis. Right? Like conscious hypnosis, someone puts you into that state so that they can cast positive spells in your brain. But this is all happening, you know, that's the dark it's the dark side of it. So these women are walking with these stories that are deep in their subconscious, and and they're grappling with this kind of bizarre concept where they're like, I felt fine and yet I almost died. And so, you know, if you're listening to this and you you relate to that, like, you're who I'm talking to because it that is not that is not logical. That is not how our bodies work. That is the that is one of the most epic examples of successful fracture and outsourcing and disorientation from from evil outside influence. It is not true. And in any other circumstance, you know, you don't just have your appendix burst. You don't just break your arm. You don't just have a I mean, I don't know. There's, like, so many it's just so silly. It's not possible that you almost died internally from your own body and had no idea. That is not how the body works. The body is designed to give you messages and to get your fucking attention. That's its job is to get your attention. Right? It is it is so nonsensical when you really just stop and think about it, but it's in the ignorance and in the spell of this hemorrhage lineage that we all apparently come from, that everyone was dying left and right until the fairy dust and until we were saved. Right? It's, like, so deep in our consciousness that then women can be told in their births that they almost died even though they felt fine. I mean, if you can trick someone into believing that, you could actually convince them that they have a magical flu that they have no symptoms of. Right? That that they should cover their face for two years even though they feel fine. I mean, you can convince them that that men can give birth, that I mean, you can convince them of anything if you can separate a woman from her own body that much that they will believe. And I am not making fun of, you know, anyone who who is grappling with this story. It's to I I'm I'm trying to, like, poke the absolute nonsense of that story so that you can really have permission to question it because it's very likely that no one in your life is creating any space for you to question the bullshit propaganda you've been told.
Speaker 1
Mhmm. Mhmm. Yeah. It's absolutely true. And it's not a problem to not feel fine after giving birth.
Speaker 2
And then there's that.
Speaker 1
It's not a problem to feel dysregulated, to feel panicked, to feel like you're in shock, to experience a state of shock after we give birth because we've just undergone an enormous transformation and initiation. And, our bodies have the capacity to regulate and to heal. I often feel, yeah, very, very uncomfortable right after I give birth, as well as feeling ecstasy and bliss and adoration for my baby and incredible clarity of mind, actually. It's it's okay for those paradoxes to to exist.
Speaker 2
God, it's so predatory. Like, can you imagine telling a new mother that she just doesn't really know? She just doesn't really get how she feels and that I need to shoot you up with drugs you say you don't want and and put stuff in your bum. I mean, god. Yeah. It's so dark. It's so fucking dark. Yes. So then there's let's flush that out a bit because this is another aspect of the myth busting that's important because it is in our own ignorance where this shit can be perpetuated. And if you think feeling shaky and, you know, being a little, like, a little, I'm gonna say overwhelmed for lack of a better word, you know, the stuff that Yo just described. I mean, I've really heard the whole gamut of, you know, women have thought that they were hemorrhaging because they didn't feel an immediate connection to their baby. Like, I've just heard so many creative re ways to explain that something was definitely wrong when when there are no facts of anything, being wrong. So, again, it is in our own ignorance of not knowing and understanding physiological birth that these predatory systems can continue harming us. So we we have to share stories. We have to learn. Right? So signs of shock that are leading into an unresolvable issue is going to be clear because you are going to work to resolve them. And that in law you know, will lie the information. So Yo and I are both saying that when we are with women who feel it just seems like they just need a little extra support. They're not they're not maybe the radiant, warm, glowy, super present, vigorous, like, you know, there's like a certain there's there's a full spectrum, of course, of how women are postpartum. Oh, I also wanna say before we get into signs that just another thing worth mentioning around debriefing hemorrhage stories that I know you're gonna you're gonna resonate with this is that when I when women come to me to unpack hemorrhage home birth stories, almost across the board, one of the things that they will all have as a common denominator is they were birthed they birthed wherever they were, and then the medical midwife insisted that they move, that they get out of the water, that they get onto the bed, that they start the, you know, third stage management. They're not in the right position. The mid medical midwife won't like her being in the water because it's hard for her to gauge her blood loss. You know, there's all these fantastical reasons why the midwife medical midwife needs to come in and fuck with this perfect bubble that is is, you know, here, that is happening with this family. And then shocker, a woman is forced to get out of the tub, to do something she doesn't wanna do, to walk when she's not ready to, and there might be some dysregulation. Well, that that makes sense. You know, that that sounds absolutely insane to me to suggest a mother moves within fifteen minutes of her giving birth. My goodness. How selfish. How deranged, really. So, again, this might be your story. And and you can ask yourself, you know, if if you walk with this story, I'm a bleeder. I hemorrhaged. I needed that pit. Midwife saved my life. Blah blah blah. What really happened, and how did you feel, and what facts do you have? Right? Like, really get clear on that and and what happened in the room and how were you supported or not supported. That's gonna give you a lot of interesting, ingredients to work with how this story gets made up. So let's end this conversation with, as sovereign birth workers, you've mentioned a couple times bleeding too much that it makes you feel a little uncomfortable, and so that will call you to support the mother in particular ways to help her resolve. Why don't you, yeah, like, really articulate what that means?
Speaker 1
Mhmm. I mean, I I think first, we have to actually be present with what is real. So our discomfort doesn't also necessarily mean that there's a problem. So we have to actually assess whether or not we're projecting something onto this mother. So that's, I think, the first course of action. And, you know, we learn to do that in a split second, like check-in with yourself. What am I, like, what's actually going on with me? What are the facts? What are the facts, and what belongs to me, and what actually doesn't belong to me as as a a birth witness?
Speaker 2
Learn how to do all this in the radical birth keeper school.
Speaker 1
No. There we go. And then just what is required to support a mother in the recalibration of her body, and that is the atmospherics have to be attended to. So if you, as the birthkeeper, are projecting fear fear and feeling fear, the mother's gonna be feeling that and her body's gonna have a response to that as well. If any additional people in the room are agitated or anxious or, you know, creating drama unnecessarily that needs to be sort of addressed and attended to or or at least acknowledged and and worked with in a very subtle and and skillful way. And then the mother herself might be feeling a lot of fear because of this story that she might be carrying. So there's a lot of factors that go into that. And just the way that we speak to mothers, makes a huge difference. So I always, especially when there's some additional energy or or a sense of drama or some fear going on in the room, I am gonna respond to that by actually really softening myself and and attending to my energy, and my voice will become much more calm. So I'm gonna have a kind of, contrasting response to additional drama or high energy. And then just in a practical way, what is it that supports the uterus in, in in stopping bleeding in in in in the the contractions and expansions that will stop bleeding. And that really has a lot to do with the hormonal balance of of the mother. So what is it that produces the oxytocin that's required for the uterus to do its work? Again, that's calm, a sense of love and connection, and of course, the mother nursing. So that's something that's really important. Is the mother connecting with her baby? Is the environment conducive to the mother connecting with her baby? Many mothers, will not necessarily be ready to breastfeed immediately, but just ensuring that the mother is skin to skin with her baby. So there's a lot of women who wear bras during birth. I think that that's a factor in in, yeah, that that creates a physical literal barrier between the baby and the mother. So, supporting the mother in in getting naked or being naked, And then just nourishment, food, water, supporting the mother in just in cuddling her baby and lying down as well. I think if we're up if we're upright, that can create a lot of destabilization. Sometimes just lying back can be supportive of of that recalibration. And then often, if there's there are some different things involved if the placenta has yet to emerge, if there really is a lot of bleeding that seems uncontrollable, I have been in a very rare number of situations where it has seemed pretty clear to me that the next move is to support the mother, very, very calmly, very easefully, very lovingly in birthing her placenta. So that can be an important thing to do. But I really it's very rare that it's come to that. Most of the time, I'm not pushing the birth of placenta whatsoever. And, again, mothers will know, so I'm not ever dictating to a mother what needs to happen. I am responding to her communication, and I'm honoring the process that's right for her. You know, there is no formula to this. It's always very, very unique to each specific woman and each specific situation and the relational dynamics in the room and how her partner is supporting her or not. And, again, what I found is that excessive blood, or more blood than I'm comfortable with or the more blood than the mother's comfortable with really always fundamentally comes down to, a sense of not really being supported. So in what way can I support this mother and allow her to feel that she is really being held and loved and nurtured so that she can then hold and love and nurture her baby? Yeah. So it's really obvious stuff for the most part. There's nothing magic about it. But these are factors that are largely absent from industrial birth dynamics, including the industrial birth dynamics that are imported into a home situation.
Speaker 2
Yeah. I would add some logistical stuff that, again, is, like, so obvious. It's almost silly to mention, but it can feel nice to have some, yeah, real practical things in your back pocket if you're new to this. And I would really only implement any of this, if which is not likely. It's not common, but if it felt to me like the mother was dysregulated. So that's not that's not gonna be the majority of women that I've that I've attended. But every now and then, yeah, every now and then, you know, I'm doing stuff without her noticing. Like, I'm noticing her color. I'm noticing everything. I'm noticing everything that's happening as she meets her baby, but no one knows anything. I'm not saying any of it, but I'm paying attention to all of it. Right? And so sometimes I will do eye contact with her. Like, I'll I'll call her name and I'll be like, hey. How you feeling? And just look her in the eyes. And a couple of times, it's, like, pretty obvious. Like, oh, she's not actually doing so great. She's not it's maybe she won't even look me in the eyes or maybe she, Yeah. It's just kinda like not fully there. You can feel it. Right? If you're paying attention. And so that those would be the times when I would be more action oriented. But like Yo said, women, it's more likely for a woman to be like, is this bleeding okay? Am I okay? Which is fine. It's normal and great and and totally understandable to ask that especially if you have a story around your blood. Anyway, so some logistical stuff would be keeping her warm. Right? Keeping baby on her chest. When a mom is in her pushing phase, if she still has clothes on, I'm pretty annoying about, like, hey, let's take your bra off the next time you have a a break. You know, let's let's get this puppy off because it's way more complicated to do that once the baby's there and you're, like, stuck in a weird position, and it's just more complicated. And usually, they're like, shut it off. And, you know, if we could just get it off easy easily with pushing, that's a good time to do it. But, anyway, warmth, which includes the feet. Holding the feet can feel really grounding. That's a easy one to do if she's not in the water. And that's a great place for me to position myself because I'm not, like, all up in it with her and the baby and the partner. So, I'll often just go down to where her feet are and, you know, I'm still kind of in the field. This and this is only when I'm feeling like she needs some support in regulating. Otherwise, I'm pretty back drop. But holding the feet or even putting socks on her feet, having a blanket or a towel around her torso, baby staying on her chest, in in some cases, you know, she's I've had her put her legs up, but that's only really two times that I can think of where that felt like the right thing to do. You know, getting some bone broth in her system. Maybe I already have that going in the kitchen, and just talking talking with her because, you know, women are very capable of explaining what's happening. And her being able to look at me and say something is really helpful for me to gauge kinda how far out she is, because then it's also worth mentioning there's the spiritual context of, you know, she might not fully land back in her body for days. And that's okay as long as, like, everything is okay, as long as she feels okay. But holding that kind of shamanic space too of she doesn't have to be fully back in the room yet. She's still she's still in an altered state, and that's great. There's a real magic to that. And then like Yo said, the I just wanna be really clear about this. The vast majority of excessive bleeding is going to occur from baby out to placenta when the placenta is still in. That's just, like, the majority of the time. And, yes, it can happen once the placenta is out, but that's way less common. And so getting the placenta out is ultimately going to be what curtails the bleeding and resolves, you know, in any dysregulation physically. You know, there might still be energetics to tend to. And so, you know, like Yo said, what's so significant about this that I don't see in medical, midwifery is how to do that with so much ease and grace and groundedness. It it just is so imperative that the you're the anchor of the room that's so so relaxed. And and like you always says about the spell casting, you know, I've seen births where it did feel like a lot of blood. And I have had plenty of moms look up at me and go, is this okay? And I'll say something like, that looks like the perfect amount. And it's just like, boom. Like, done. You know? Or one of my first births, it was with a traditional midwife. I was the family member, and she was birthed on a birth stool, and and a lot of blood was coming out, after baby before placenta. And the midwife looked at her and looked in her eyes and said, I want you to tell your body to stop bleeding now. But she did it calmly. You know? It wasn't, like, it wasn't dramatic. It could have been. And this woman closed her eyes, and you I could I was watching her vagina, and it just stopped. And I've used that trick you could say or spell, you know, so much since because it really is that simple when you're that anchored and when you're that, it's not just like unafraid. It's like when you actually respect women's ability to regulate. The the best tool you have in the room is the woman's own mind.
Speaker 1
Mhmm. Mhmm. Absolutely. Yeah. I I've I've often said just statements that are true, like, your bleeding's gonna subside very soon. Mhmm. You'll find. You know? And it really is a it is a spell. And it works.
Speaker 2
I remember that in my first birth, looking up at my friend and being like, it does the I was like, how does my bleeding look? I think is what I said. And she looked, she looked, took a little look and she said, it looks great. And it just felt so good to hear that. It's like, oh, okay, great. You know? And that that sweetness and that vulnerability is so so shit on in the system. You know? It's so taken advantage of, and it's so twisted. It's just so upsetting because it's so epic as an as a birth attendant to be given that kind of trust, you know, that that the woman looks at you and asks you this really important question that's going to shape her next hour. You know, it's gonna shape her whole field, what you say. God, it's just such a big responsibility, and there's so much trust. Alright. I think we covered a lot of ground.
Speaker 1
We covered a lot of ground. I think we should maybe do an episode on supporting the birth of the placenta because that's very much tied to this topic, and it's a whole topic unto itself as well. So maybe someday.
Speaker 2
I guess the last thing I that's on my mind that maybe we didn't fully flush out is just that it's really our all of our individual work to do of fear of blood. And I know so many women when they have a miscarriage, because miscarriage is so not normalized and no one talks about it and everyone goes into the system to have these brutal extractions of their uterine lining, it's all very dramatic. And what I find that women don't don't understand or know about miscarriage is that it's often a lot of blood. Like, a lot more. Right.
Speaker 1
It just burns. Yeah.
Speaker 2
A lot more. Not always, but often, it seems. I haven't had one myself, but I've I've supported plenty. It's a lot more blood than one may expect. And so many women make up when they see that much blood that they're having a hemorrhage because that's the cultural story that if you're having if you are dumb enough to allow your pregnancy to release at home, you little lady have no idea how close you're gonna be. How would you even know? You're gonna bleed out and die and leave your whole family. You know, this is the story that women are still holding and perpetuating and making be true. And, again, women will tell me their miscarriage stories and it's like, oh, yeah. Yeah. Totally. Lots of blood. Oh, went on for days. Oh, it stopped during the day and it happened at night multiple nights. Yep. That's just what miscarriage can be. But they believe that they are dying, and And they go to the hospital and have these really dramatic, you know, really dramatic extractions so that they can continue walking with this really dramatic story that they are uniquely broken and that they uniquely hemorrhaged. It's just like, okay. I mean, you know, this isn't gonna sound very sensitive, but, like, you're welcome to do that. You're welcome to make up as you do, whatever dramatic unique stories you have about yourself and your body. And I have so much respect for the women who are willing to really question them and really think about it and really try on different possibilities because
Speaker 1
And to really ask themselves that very hard question of what is it that I'm actually getting out of carrying the story with me? Why am I cultivating this identity as a woman who whose body doesn't function?
Speaker 2
Right.
Speaker 1
Because there's a lot of cookies actually in that.
Speaker 2
And it's so deep. Right? Like, to be afraid of our own blood, like, what an epic, what an epic, successful, brilliant, what's the right word, campaign. Like, get women afraid of their most primal life force? Damn. Like, boom. There's the last ten thousand years. You know? Like, wow. That was really successful, which is why, you know, we we had Nancy and Kristen on this season to talk about these micro shifts of how do we come into right relationship with our blood and what are ritualistic, you know, or affirmational, you know, things we can do with our monthly blood to reclaim and reorient to a positive relationship because birth is often bloody. Early birth miscarriage, of course, would involve blood, and none of that is wrong or bad. But if you keep a woman scared of her blood, I mean, industrial birth lives on. Okay. Well, we did it. We should do the placenta episode next season. If you are listening to this in real time, we are enrolling for a few more weeks in the radical birth keeper school. And that is a program we have done many times over since twenty twenty, and it's new and improved. Got a face lift, and lots of you have already enrolled. Yeah. I just really invite you to come do this dive with us. It's really the best of what Yo and I both have to offer. This was a little taster of that. It's a lot of deprogramming, you know, as I'm sure you're aware if you listen to this podcast. And you also know from listening to this podcast what is possible in the live women who are willing to deprogram. So join us. Anything you wanna add?
Speaker 1
You covered it. Can't wait.
Speaker 2
You know, when the world knows responsible birth attendants, I mean, culture really changes. Right? And in the cultures where I've seen, the micro cultures where responsible integrity based midwives have shown up and started serving, it's pretty incredible to see how a whole community can change, how how free birth or sovereign birth, midwife attended birth, you know, birth of sovereign birth paradigm start to kind of be contagious. Right? I've seen women's circles, like, one woman births in a sovereign way and then starts attending. And then three within three years, everyone is doing that and how that impacts the rest of the family current. It's so exciting and cool, and that that's part of what's at the heart of the radical birth keeper school is if you're called to, be in responsibility with how you serve women and how you hold the energetics of birth, in a birth and also with coaching and with education and all the stuff, you know, probably so many of you are lit up to do. We're happy to teach you what what we've worked really hard to figure out. It's kind of a yeah. What's the word I'm looking for? No no one no one taught this, you know, to to me, and I learned it with blood, sweat, and tears. And not that you get out of that, you still have to have your own lived experience. But I do think this puts you on a much faster track of evolution with birth work getting a program like this.
Speaker 1
Oh, definitely. We've we've both distilled our triumphs and failures into a program that will definitely equip women to to step into this work, and it's growing like wildfire. I think there's really no other area of life that's more important, especially now given everything that's happening in the world.
Speaker 2
Alright. So join us radical birth keeper school dot com. You can learn all about it. And thank you, Yo. Thanks for your time. I love you.
Speaker 1
Love you too. Bye.
Speaker 2
I hope you enjoyed the show today. You can support this podcast by donating to it on free birth society dot com and leaving an awesome review on whatever platform you listen on. The more reviews, the more visibility the show gets, so let's spread the word of Sovereign Birth. We've always got a lot going on at Free Birth Society, and you can find out about all of it at free birth society dot com, at free birth society on Instagram, and opt in to my newsletter below in the show notes. We offer courses on free birth, authentic midwifery, and the blood mysteries, as well as one on one coaching, in person retreats, and, of course, our annual women's festival. Our exclusive vetted private membership is definitely something to check out if you're looking for a community of wise sisters. Together, we rise. We must speak our stories, claim our lives, and support one another. This is the living revolution, and I am so grateful to be in it with all of you. I'll leave you with our epic Free Birth Society theme song, Wild Woman by Aruba Red.
Speaker 3
I honor you for the wisdom you held, the ancient traditions of plant medicine and womb magic. I feel the spirit of the ancestors as I place my hands upon my belly. This sacred portal will be honored. Eons upon light beams of survival, withstanding the eradication of our power by design. I will not allow the separation of our young to be forced upon me. My sisters will no longer birth in in captivity. The picket line redefined from burning our wild women to paralyzing us and drugging our babes. Strapped down in a clinical white bed, drying up the milk from our breasts, keep your needles. My family will never again be doomed to chase those dragons or your poison. We reject your fear. We choose love. Everything with intention. Death, ascension. I will fly and bring her back from the star.
