An interview with Suzanne Arms
By Ravi Dykema

The entry into the world of another soul is among the holiest of events. But in our modern society, birth is still often treated with little reverence. Suzanne Arms is the author of the ground-breaking book, Immaculate Deception (1975), one of the first books to expose the horrors of modern hospital birthing practices. Arms wrote a follow-up book, Immaculate Deception II: Myth, Magic and Birth  (Celestial Arts, 1996), that both revisits hospital maternity wards and also looks into the far-reaching impacts that many birthing practices may have on our children. She also made a video, "Giving Birth: Challenges and Choices" (Birthing The Future, 1998). Arms has spent more than 30 years researching birthing practices around the world. What she found: The experience moms and babies have in hospitals is far removed from any natural paradigm, and may have a profound, negative impact later in life. Here, Arms shares some of her theories, as well as a vision for a more natural birthing model, with Nexus publisher Ravi Dykema.

RD: How has natural childbirth developed in the United States?

SA: There have been several phases in the movement toward a more natural model of birth. First, there was a general movement in the mid-'70s of people having home births and the number of midwives increasing, as people became unwilling to have interventions in their births. Because they were eating natural foods, living more on the land and dropping out of society in general, these same people discovered that what was in store for them in the hospital didn't have anything to do with their philosophies. It made no sense to them that a natural process would be abnormal and pathological, so they started having home births.

      The second phase of the movement toward natural childbirth was about women's consciousness and empowerment. Women began to realize that natural childbirth- particularly at home, where she was wearing her own clothes, walking around drinking her tea and visiting with her husband- did something dramatic to a woman's psyche. She often found it a spiritual experience, sometimes an orgasmic experience. These women began to realize other women hadn't had these experiences, that birth was not an empowering or consciousness-connecting experience. Women who had unnatural births found themselves feeling strangely disconnected from their bodies, often from their babies, and with a feeling of loss and sometimes unexplainable anger.

      The third phase of the movement involved the spiritual connection to and consciousness of the babies. Frederick Le Boyer, father of the LeBoyer bath and author of Birth Without Violence  (Inner Traditions International, 1995) studied yoga in India and began to be aware of the consciousness of the newborn. He began to have births occur in low lights or darkness, and have the mother and everyone else in the room be absolutely quiet. After the birth, he would receive the baby and proceed to give it a slowed-down introduction to the world. Instead of hyper-stimulating it, moving and wrapping and washing it, he'd place it in a warm water bath and watch it unfold. His book was pivotal for me- I had been doing all this research on women and birth and I totally forgot what it meant to babies to be born through women who were drugged and anesthetized and separated from them. That led to the fourth stage of the birth movement, the transformation of consciousness around the baby as a feeling, sentient, very sensitive and aware human being.

RD: Where are we now with transforming the birth experience?

SA: Right now, we're just at the edge of the fifth stage, which is an awareness of the importance of pre-conception for mother and baby. Ancient and tribal cultures recognize the ability of the tribe, the elders, the mother and the father, to bring in a baby of a particular consciousness by tuning their own psyche prior to conception. So they actually have pre-conception processes, and pre-pregnancy pregnancy- what they call pregnancy before the woman is physically pregnant. It's a meshing of tribal earth-based wisdom with eastern philosophy, and an understanding of the nature of the soul. That hasn't even touched this culture yet, but that's where we're heading.

RD: What did childbearing practices look like 20 or 30 years ago, before things started to change?

SA: It was, in many cases, appalling. What shocked me most when I visited maternity wards while doing research for Immaculate Deception was the isolation of the women. In the early Ô70s, once in a while there would be a midwife student at one of the rare medical centers where nurse midwifery was beginning. But for the most part, women were alone in labor and alone in birth. At that time, there was no policy allowing husbands. Women were often strapped down, and some hospitals were still using the leather straps and restraints that evolved as a result of "twilight sleep," a toxic combination of an amnesia drug and a heavy narcotic, which rendered women so crazy they would scratch themselves and hurl themselves out of bed. These women were frightened and alone, and they didn't know what was happening to them.

      Then I'd follow the babies into the nursery, and I was outraged by what I saw. I have one mental picture that's so telling: I saw a nurse using a sterile scrub-brush- an extremely stiff and harsh brush doctors use to scrub their nails- to do  a full scrub on a brand new baby as it screamed. The nurse was trying to get the baby clean enough to return to its mother where she could see it and hold it for the first time. And I almost vomited.

RD: The images you're describing sound like a torture chamber.

SA: It's not a torture chamber if everybody's silent. The babies were basically silenced with pacifiers or bottles and swaddling and drugs, and a lot of them had shut down from the shock of what was going on from the separation at birth. The babies weren't screaming and crying- and neither were the mothers. Everybody was very quiet in those halls. I saw smiling nurses and happy doctors hanging babies up by the heels to straighten their spines that had been curved for nine months, and laughing as this baby screamed, saying the baby was just "exercising its lungs." None of those scenes had the signals that would say, "This is wrong."

RD: What does it look like today?

SA: It's a very different picture. Thirty to 40 percent of educated, middle- to upper-class women over the age of 30 are getting cesareans. Sixty to 90 percent of women are having epidural anesthesia. And we still have routine episiotomies- cutting of the perineal tissue- for most first-time moms. We have large and increasing numbers of artificially induced labor.

      At the same time, we have women who are awake, and we have babies who aren't washed before they're given to the mother, so there's been great improvement. We're still doing very unnatural births- but women like it. Women will tell you they loved their cesarean and they loved their epidural. These are women who are athletes, who go to elaborate lengths to care for their bodies, and they're giving birth without any awareness that this doesn't fit the philosophy of the life they're trying to lead.

RD: How many women are actually giving birth naturally?

SA: Only about five percent of births in America are fully normal and natural, and the home birth rate in America is less than one percent. In the Ô70s, there was a brief period when husbands and families were allowed into the labor rooms, and it looked like there would be a resurgence in natural childbirth. Then, the electronic fetal monitor was developed. The fetal monitor keeps a continuous visual and auditory record of the baby's heart tones. As a result, doctors started seeing variability and patterns in infant heart rates that they couldn't understand, which led to skyrocketing cesareans. Any confidence that birth could be natural went down the tubes. Essentially, we've evolved a culture that believes birth is unnatural and risky, and that modern women shouldn't be subjected to it. In the early days of hospital birth, labor was treated as a pathology, where women were completely anesthetized and unconscious. Most doctors are still being trained in that model.

RD: But aren't hospital births inherently safer?

SA: Not really. Our infant mortality is among the worst in all of the developed world, and we spend more on birth than any other country. Some of the best research is presented in Safer Childbirth? A Critical History of Maternity Care, by Marjorie Tew (Free Association Books), a book on effective care of the newborn and the pregnant and birthing woman. It shows that everything we do as a routine or common intervention practice in birth has a strong value for a tiny number of mothers and babies, and if used widely or routinely has more risks than benefits. That includes IVs, inducing labor, withholding food and drink, sedatives, anesthetics, artificial hormones to speed up labor, episiotomy, forceps, vacuum extraction, cesareans, and separating mother and baby. Not a single one of these practices has any solid scientific evidence behind it.

RD: What do you think is the answer?

SA: I would never say we should go back to birth without having hospitals, any more than I would say that people should all die at home. But we can shift our understanding and consciousness. We have a memory of birth as a terrible process, but in fact, tribal cultures have handled birth very well, with the exceptions of rare complications. They've handled birth with spiritual and psychological methods, by keeping women happy, providing skillful hands-on care and massage and judiciously using herbs when necessary.

      I think the answer lies in a model that embraces intuitive wisdom and traditional practices from tribal cultures with modern scientific knowledge about those rare complications that benefit from modern knowledge. It would include psychic preparation of men and women to bring another life into the world. It would involve understanding that the tribe and community have as much at stake in every new child as do the mother and father. It would embrace all kinds of preparation psychically and emotionally, including ritual, diet, exercise and rest, so that women come to conception in a high state of wellness.

RD: What are the long-term implications of an unnatural birth?

SA: An unhealthy birth experience can have profound effects on the experience of the child and adult. Current evidence shows that if we have too many stressful situations too early, we tend to stay in a state of hyperarousal, what we call the "fight-or-flight" response, with consistently increased adrenaline output. That's why many adults have overtaxed adrenal glands and weakened immune systems. There are other signs: You can see it in how a person carries their body, whether they move as if they're carrying an enormous weight, how tightly they hold their fists, what their jaw is doing. In children, you can see it in how comfortable they feel pushing you away or drawing you in, with their body language and how well they make and sustain eye contact. In a very young child, birth trauma typically manifests as a lot of colic, projectile vomiting, an inability to be comforted, and general nervousness and jitters.

RD: How can birth trauma be healed?

SA: The human species is resilient, so many children will naturally heal from birth trauma through breast feeding or a psychic link with a parent. Young children are easy to heal because very simple things work for them, like rocking, holding, skin-to-skin contact, moving more slowly, and reading their signals very carefully so you meet their needs but don't invade their space. Breast feeding is very important. Other approaches, like homeopathy, baby massage and cranial/sacral work are powerful ways to calm a child's nervous system. 

      Most adults need more than psychotherapy for healing. The part of the brain that's affected by an unnatural birth experience is the primitive brain, not the intellectual brain, so it can't necessarily be accessed by reasoning. Touch is extremely important in affecting the primitive part of the brain, so massage and other kinds of bodywork, like acupuncture and craniosacral therapy, are very beneficial. Therapeutic drumming and certain forms of dancing, singing, art and chanting can also access the primitive brain and heal trauma. Meditation, yoga and tai chi can affect the overall sense of well-being and calm the body's fight-or-flight mechanisms.

RD: Can you give us an example of an adult pattern caused by birth trauma, and how it can be healed?

SA: I can give you a specific personal example. My mother had the typical amount of drugs in labor, and her legs were held together so I couldn't be born until the doctor arrived. Then I was separated from her and kept in a hospital nursery for five days. I came to adult life with a great deal of physical tension, nightmares, anxiety and a tendency toward depression. I had a lot of tension in my jaw, symbolic of trying to hold on. I started picking away at my patterns with anything I could find. I started with psychotherapy, then I went to bodywork, craniosacral work, yoga, meditation, singing and chanting, and African dance and drumming. Over a period of time, I held my jaw differently. I didn't clench it. These days, I don't even clench it when I'm tense. The jaw tension operated at the ancient brain level, and that pattern is gone from my body. That's the most telling signal- if stressful situations don't elicit a physical response, you know you're on the right track.

RD: What if we really want to change the world of childbirth? What are the most important things to know?

SA: To change the whole culture, we have to stop training so many obstetricians and use them just for back-up and technical care. We have to increase the training of midwives and teach them how to protect natural, normal childbirth and not be seduced into practicing obstetric care. We have to lower the fear level about birth among people being trained as doctors, midwives and nurses, as well as the general public, so a woman doesn't begin her labor thinking that she's going to be in 12 hours of constant pain. And doctors need to understand that when a woman is crying out in labor, she doesn't need drugs as the first line of defense. She needs someone to rub and hold her, to give her a warm bath and sing to her.

      On another level, we need to create sacred environments, like the healing temples in ancient Greece, for a baby and mother during birth. We need to consider what sounds are in the environment- whether it's the beep-beep of a machine or the sound of beautiful music and people talking softly. We need to consider the source of light, whether it's fluorescent bulbs or natural light and candlelight. In most hospital birthing units, you find people playing cards, talking loudly and watching television. That's hardly a sacred environment in which to birth a child. And we need to make sure no woman is ever alone in labor unless she really wants to be, that she has a system of support and nurturing.

RD: What's standing in the way of creating that kind of environment?

SA: There has been an active attempt to close birthing centers. Doctors don't want to back them, and insurance companies don't want to pay. As the money is squeezed more tightly, doctors are getting reimbursed less and midwives are losing their hospital privileges, because they're now competing with doctors. And we have state obstetric organizations alerting their members about an effort to eliminate all non-physician providers.

      We can change the external environment, but the biggest change requires a shift in consciousness and the understanding that everything we care about in the movement for high-level wellness relates directly to birth. Other issues also relate to birth: Restoration and preservation of the precious environment of the earth, and even connection to spirit. So it really is a spiritual issue, and an environmental issue, as well as a feminist issue.

RD: Can you recommend some books for our readers?

SA:If you're preparing for giving birth, or thinking more about your own birth, or curious about childbirth in general, I would recommend four books and one video. The first, Subonfu Som's Welcoming Spirit Home (New World Libraries, 1999) is about birth, children, ritual and community and the ancestors in an African village. My book, Immaculate Deception II: Myth, Magic and Birth, presents a history of childbirth and how far we've come, good and bad, as well as information about birth around the world. A book called Birthing from Within: An Extraordinary Guide To Childbirth Preparation by Pam England explains inward preparation for childbirth, to lessen fear and to be able to birth normally. If you have a passion for research, read Henci Goer's The Thinking Woman's Guide to a Better Birth, which presents research on the routine practices of American hospital birth and their safety and effectiveness. To see what normal, natural childbirth really is, get the video Giving Birth: Challenges and Choices (you can order it for $29.95 by calling 1-877-BIRTHING).  

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