So...what would happen if you didn't push?

You know? In the last part of labour...to get your baby out. What if you didn't push?

Astonishingly, some women never get the chance to push because... Something. Happens. First.

The most AMAZING thing can happen in birth—the 'Fetal Ejection Reflex'. 

Have you ever hear stories where the mother says, "...and my baby just propelled out of me".

Yep. That propulsion is the "Fetal Ejection Reflex" and it is POWERFUL!

But it only happens if the circumstances are exactly right.

What would it be like if every women experienced the sheer power of giving birth like this?

In this episode, experienced midwife Teresa Walsh talks about a #homebirth where the birthing mother experienced this ejection reflex.

This article by Evidence Based Birth says, "In some un-medicated births, the active pushing phase may be more accurately described as the fetal ejection reflex—where the mother waits for her baby to descend and then her body expels the baby with little or no conscious effort. Mothers sometimes describe this as 'I wasn’t pushing, my baby was just coming out!'" 

In an article Do Not Disturb: The Importance of Privacy in Labor in The Perinatal Education Journal, it says:

"We, like other mammals, need to feel both safe and protected to give birth easily. If we do not feel safe and protected in early labor, catecholamine levels rise and labor shuts down. Odent describes the fetal-ejection reflex in women (Odent, 1987, 1992). During the second stage of labor, if the hormone orchestration of normal labor has been altered (e.g., by the use of pitocin or epidural analgesia), the fetal-ejection reflex does not occur.

Women choose to give birth in hospitals because they believe it is “safer” than birth outside the hospital. In fact, laboring and giving birth in most hospitals create a set of physiologic responses that actually occur when we feel unsafe and unprotected. In the typical hospital environment, women are disturbed at every turn—with machines, intrusions, strangers, and a pervasive lack of privacy. The shadow of “things going terribly wrong at any moment” follows women from one contraction to another. Together, these fears contribute in powerful ways to the release of stress hormones, moving women into an attitude of physiologic fight or flight.

On an intellectual level, a woman may believe that the hospital is a safe, protected environment, but her body reacts quite differently. No matter what her head says, her body gets the message loud and clear. Her body responds on a primal, intuitive level, kicking automatically into fight-or-flight mode and dramatically altering the process of labor and birth. In choosing modern medical “safety,” women are stressed physiologically, which makes labor and birth more difficult. The lack of attention to women's inherent need to not be disturbed in the typical hospital environment has set the stage for a [high] cesarean rate, the routine use of epidurals in labor, the high rates of augmentation of labor, and the high incidence of instrument deliveries..."

If we can keep birth undisturbed, then more women can experience the joy and sheer power of giving birth this way. 

I hope you enjoy this short and mighty episode!

Much love,

Steph