25 thoughts on “Backyard Birth

  1. Glad you like it, Tracy. We need these images of baby taking a minute to deal with the fluids of birth and get ready for that first lung filling breath with the cord intact and providing all the balance that’s needed. Very generous of this family to share such a sacred, personal event.

  2. Loved this video! Thanks for sharing Glo! Brings back beautiful memories of all our home births.

    I love seeing this worldwide movement of empowered women. It’s not that they are ignorant hippies, but rather informed, intune, and well nourished women!

    Karen

  3. What a wonderful birth, and I agree with your comment about needing to see the babies who take a bit longer to get started. I also liked the fact that it showed the mama calmly unlooping the nuchal cord after the baby was born. There is still too much misinformation out there about that issue. Loved the video. Thanks to you and the family both for sharing.

  4. So much to love about this! After I noted nice unwrapping, my next thought was what awesome gut bacteria the kid will have! Beautiful.

  5. I love it! Thank you Gloria, and may this help many people! Thank you also to the couple that sent it! 🙂 May they have many more backyard births! 🙂

  6. I don’t know the people at all, Zona, I just snagged the video from a Facebook post. Someone on FB translated the German:

    My friend Helga speaks fluent German and she interpreted it for me! Here’s what she said:

    I can’t tell what she’s saying at first. With the moaning it’s a little chopped off.
    Him:”Uii, I see a face.”
    Her:”What?”
    …Him:”I see a face.”
    Her:” Ohhh, now you can come out with the next contraction, baby. Ohhhh.”
    …As she unwraps the cord “There you go. Hello. A boy. You are too a boy. Everyone guessed wrong. Look at that – that was fast, huh? Hello, hello. Hello. Well? Are you looking at me? My, you sure were in a hurry! Him: “Oh, nice!”
    Opens her gown:”yeah, come here. It’s a little cold here. Yeah. Man, you were in a hurry. Wait, we have the towel ready, too.
    I didn’t make it to the teepee anymore.
    Him:”Emanuel…” and “the animal isn’t far away either…”
    Him”Well, are you looking? Wasn’t he kicking like a boy! ??? will have someone to play soccer.” (can’t understand the name he’s saying. Must be the older son.)
    Her:”I think, it’s almost time for the placenta, the way it feels…”
    Can’t understand what he’s saying.
    Her:”Think Gertrud is driving here?” (as opposed to walking). Can’t believe how light it still is at this time.
    I wouldn’t have made it into the forest.”

  7. Efficiency, normalcy, and LOVE to the core. 😀 I actually laughed out loud when I saw the cat jumping stealthily through the grass.

    I love it! it is so NORMAL. Just stand up and push, bend over and push, plop down to catch your baby, unwrap the cord, pick him up and greet him, give him some love, he cries so you put him on the breast. How brilliant and simple.

  8. Fantastic!

    I work at a Children’s Hospital (for now…) and it is amazing how quickly medical folks intervene on things. When I say I am studying to be a midwive, I am looked at like I am absolutely crazy.

    I say, give the babes a minute to orient themselves to their new environment! When this little guy’s opened and focused on his mama, I just gave out a whoot! And I’m at work, in clinic…

    Peace all!

  9. Wow, Gloria! You really push me in what I think and feel about birth! (this is a good thing!)
    This was amazing. But, my newbie doula concerns are could the baby have come so fast, being slippery, and she not caught him and he hit the ground? Also, when she put him momentarily on the ground, couldn’t that have made him lose body temperature quickly?
    Would love to hear what others have to say about this.

  10. How absolutely beautiful! So simple…so calm…..so special…stirred awesome memories of my two home babies ….
    Thanks for sharing …

  11. Thanks for posting this! What an awesome birth. Almost makes me want to have another one!

    I have found with my livestock it takes some of them a minute or so to start breathing and that is even with the cord snapped.

  12. AAAhhh!!!!! This is *wonderful* –everyone’s comments have been great, and I agree completely. However, no one yet has mentioned how fantastic it is to NOT see the father right in there, blathering, touchy touching, overly-encouraging, and generally being totally irritating the way many well-meaning but dorky fathers are. I love that he is just on the camera, calmly letting his partner deal, without having to stick his face and his hands all over the place. Even the most holistic births often seem to me to be marred by dads who seem to have an over-inflated sense of their own importance during the birth process.

  13. This is a very beautiful birth and …

    Hi, Yolanda. I hope you’ll visit my film site to see trailer of my film for and about men in birth. If you are speaking from your experience of your partner/the father being that way, I certainly honor that. However, if you are speaking a midwife, doula or nurse, I’d like to challenge you to consider that WHATEVER he does is very likely, part of their relationship, “the good, bad, and ugly.” It is already his role and part in their relationship and family, whether we like it or not … He has an equal role and right to be there FOR and WITH HIS baby and his partner, however he is, and that is far, far more than capturing it on film. The only good thing about him filming it … I just visited mother-baby-father where he filmed it and he has watched in “15 times since baby born four days ago”… is that he can do that. HE can see THE MOMENT for him when his baby comes out. Someone else should do that for him so can be there …. in it when HIS child emerges from HIS partner/wife. Sticking his hands and face all over the place, blathering, etc is well, it’s a version of what got that baby there. He has an equal role and he has NEEDS at birth that if ignored, violated, and disregarded profoundly impact him as a man and this impacts him as a husband and father.

    Caregivers are seeing people in their most intimate moments … you are the interloper .. the potential disruptor. What I really don’t like to see is the midwife, doula, nurse, or doctor who gets in there and acts out their own woundings, needs, and biases.

    What I wanted to comment on myself was that I am just so, so sad that so many people do not know or do not do the self-attachment breast crawl, allowing the baby to make his way, with mother’s support up to the breast to self-attach. Since that is the core of the healing work I do … healing all the stuff from labor and birth that prevented that so a person, whether, two days or twenty or seventy years, can experience self-attachment, a foundational, physiological need of the baby … and mother, but the baby experiences this profoundly in his nervous system. Most of us live the consequence of not having this experience … the reconnection, still working with mother, as in labor, of coming to her breast. What I saw in this video was some panic in the mother to get baby to breast … too fast. The breast is not what most babies want in first seconds or minutes .. they need to pause to integrate the experience … as does the mother … and then they need to continue .. AS IN LABOR … to finish birth … mother touching, eye contact. In fact, the process of making it to the mother’s breast the baby will tell his or her story of getting from the womb. It can be very healing of the breaks in their process. Pushing baby on breast is as “bad” for the baby as midwives say “push, push, pushing” baby out is.

    That baby and mama, for whatever reasons the mother has in HER nervous system that led to that fast pushing of baby to breast, have missed a moment …. a powerful, powerful moment. When we take away the hospital from birth we power up the microscope and see the midwife/homebirth caregiver’s stuff in the mix, and when we take away them and it’s just the couple we have a baby who is only dealing with his mother and father’s stuff.

  14. Oh, man! I loved this birth. I laughed and giggled through the entire thing! LIke other have stated, it was so calm and natural and matter-of-fact. it actually sort of reminded me of watching an animal give birth. Not in an insulting way, but how they ‘just know’ whats going on and let instinct take over. Wonderful!!

  15. What a wonderful birth! I did not mind that the mother helped the baby to the breast, because she seemed calm about it and the baby was crying and so why delay his first sip? It was so un-fussy. So simple and pure. Why or why can’t more mothers experience this?

    Thank you for posting this. And thanks to the family for sharing it.

  16. Hello Gloria,
    I have admired your work and teaching for so many years. I currently practice in MN but am from Canada, the land of good and sane midwifery laws. Thank you for your work with moms and babies and for speaking out against circumcision.

    This particular birth video is just amazing. Sounds like the couple was trying to make it into the forest to a tee pee. These are the images of normal, undisturbed birth that all our young men and women and boys and girls need to see.
    It feelss like to longer I practice and the more I learn the less and less I feel the need to do at anything at births. This video drives that home once again.
    Thanks for posting,

    Emme Corbeil, CPM
    Homebirth Midwife in Minneapolis/St.Paul

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