Seeing the Sacred Nature of Midwifery
Seeing the Sacred Nature of Midwifery
Chris J. Hampton (March 2007)
Every birth is Holy. I think that a midwife must be religious, because the energy she is dealing with is Holy. She needs to know that other people's energy is sacred.[1]
A midwife is simply defined by one author as “nothing more nor less than a skilled specialist in normal birth.”[2] Other names include sage-femme or “wise woman” (French), jordmother or “earth mother” (Danish), whereas midwife comes from Middle English midwif, meaning one who is “with [a pregnant] woman”[3]; from these definitions of a midwife, one can begin to see that many cultures attach more importance than the first definition here seems to denote. More common in Native American cultures are women as ethnobotanists, healers, and leaders of ceremony—some of which who would be midwives as well.[4] Furthermore, in indigenous cultures such as Native American cultures, it is more common to find what Western scholars would separate as religion, culture and healing, all combined in one connected cultural system or lifeway.[5] In order to broaden an understanding of the woman, birth, midwifery, nature, and the body, this paper seeks to utilize concepts more akin to the connected, rather than compartmentalized traditions so common in autochthonous peoples. Inherent in a process such a culture's birthing traditions and knowledge are elements of religion or spirituality, empirical science, myth, ethnobotany, medicine, oral narrative, social psychology and so on, and so the plethora of areas of humanity must be acknowledged and considered when seeking to understand the natural, most basic human sacrament of birth in its relation to humans. As such, midwifery can not be limited by simplistic, monolithic definitions, but must be understood as a rich, complex and layered tradition very much adapted to the cultures which utilize it; furthermore, future progress in Western gender relations, attitudes toward women, the body,
Chris J. Hampton (March 2007)
Every birth is Holy. I think that a midwife must be religious, because the energy she is dealing with is Holy. She needs to know that other people's energy is sacred.[1]
A midwife is simply defined by one author as “nothing more nor less than a skilled specialist in normal birth.”[2] Other names include sage-femme or “wise woman” (French), jordmother or “earth mother” (Danish), whereas midwife comes from Middle English midwif, meaning one who is “with [a pregnant] woman”[3]; from these definitions of a midwife, one can begin to see that many cultures attach more importance than the first definition here seems to denote. More common in Native American cultures are women as ethnobotanists, healers, and leaders of ceremony—some of which who would be midwives as well.[4] Furthermore, in indigenous cultures such as Native American cultures, it is more common to find what Western scholars would separate as religion, culture and healing, all combined in one connected cultural system or lifeway.[5] In order to broaden an understanding of the woman, birth, midwifery, nature, and the body, this paper seeks to utilize concepts more akin to the connected, rather than compartmentalized traditions so common in autochthonous peoples. Inherent in a process such a culture's birthing traditions and knowledge are elements of religion or spirituality, empirical science, myth, ethnobotany, medicine, oral narrative, social psychology and so on, and so the plethora of areas of humanity must be acknowledged and considered when seeking to understand the natural, most basic human sacrament of birth in its relation to humans. As such, midwifery can not be limited by simplistic, monolithic definitions, but must be understood as a rich, complex and layered tradition very much adapted to the cultures which utilize it; furthermore, future progress in Western gender relations, attitudes toward women, the body,