Have you seen this? This peaceful, unassisted water birth on a porch at the edge of a meadow… the one where the baby received a little assistance from her mother to finish being born? It’s worth watching. And have gratitude for the brave and bold @thealliewoods for livestreaming and sharing her very personal moments with the world.

And have you seen this? The response of a popular leader of the freebirth movement to Allie’s application of the term shoulder dystocia to her birth and the actions she took to resolve it?

In summary, the mother (Allie) who gave birth experienced in her body and through her informed assessment that her baby was experiencing a shoulder dystocia and in light of that she made a couple intentional moves to help “loose” her baby so she could finish being born. But Yolanda is saying that it wasn’t a “true” shoulder dystocia but just totally normal and that Allie was needlessly catastrophizing the situation.

Why does this matter?

Two primary takeaways I want to touch on here:

1) Remain very, very humble when attempting to analyze, evaluate, and assess a birth situation that you have only seen on video. There are things you cannot know/sense/see without being there in real life as a witness or in the mother’s body. Therefore, your “take” on what did or did not happen in that room and what should or should not have been done by the mother or her attendants is inherently limited. Be careful.

2) Whether or not what Allie experienced was a textbook example of shoulder dystocia is not the point. The main point is that Allie was a responsible, informed free-birther who had done due diligence to know how to recognize signs of “stuck” babies and had strategies to employ if her baby was to become stuck. She was therefore able to trust her informed instinct and quickly act accordingly to assist her baby when her emergence wasn’t occurring spontaneously. And that’s commendable. That’s the goal, in my opinion.

I don’t care what you want to call it; I care that you are informed, that you trust your instincts, and don’t hesitate to act when birth is deviating from normal or safe for you or your baby.

So, let’s explore how this impacts the choices of free birthers.

There are a couple of approaches to free — or, more accurately, unassisted –birth.

1. One is to choose willful ignorance by minimizing the risks and opting not to study them or develop preparedness strategies because of concern that too much knowledge might impair the instinctual, smooth unfolding of birth by either “calling in” those complications or by simply putting the birther too much in her analytical mind thereby pulling her out of the primal state she needs to be in to give birth in an undisturbed, physiological way like other mammals do (cows certainly don’t study birth complications).
2. The other is to make oneself aware not only of the normal, physiological birth process but also the rare instances where complications threaten it, and then to study how to recognize and address those things if your birth happens to be one in which one of those rare complications occurs. This comes with the challenge of needing to learn how to intentionally set aside that information when you’re actually in labor so that you can enter into the aforementioned primal state, being careful not to go looking for problems that aren’t there just because you know those problems are possibilities, and knowing you can pull that information out of your memory bank if it’s needed and be able to confidently and effectively take care of a problem should one arise.

Now, answer these questions: Which is more empowering for the woman giving birth? Which makes birth safer for those who opt not to have birth attendants? Which is more responsible? Which approach resonates with YOU?

I’m not here to give you a correct answer because I’m not entirely sure there is one. But I do want to invite you — especially if you are considering an unassisted birth — to explore your own responses to these questions.

Consider Embrace Birth Journey as a cornerstone resource for working through all the things pertaining to home birth or unassisted birth preparation.