In 2010, my sister in law Ellie asked me to attend the birth of her first child in Edinburgh. I was most honoured by this request and, of course agreed immediately.
I was reading a lot of Michel Odent’s articles at the time, and was feeling very inspired by them, and began doing some research on what his thoughts and feelings were around doulas – I was pleasantly surprised to find that he had done lots of writing on the subject AND offered a doula course of his own!
My heart raced as I realised that he was offering a course for three days before I was due to be with Ellie!
Talk about synchronicity!
So, after ten years of pretty much being a full-time breastfeeding, stay at home, homeschooling mother, I travelled to the UK and attended Michel and Liliana’s Paramana doula course in London.
How do I describe the experience? Well, first of all, I was late! I got lost on my way there and arrived to a circle of about twenty women and Michel Odent (so weird to see someone so familiar in the flesh for the first time). They had all just finished their introductions. I was asked to say who I was and where I was from. As I said, “South Africa,” everyone roared with laughter and I got a fright. Seems there was a person from each humanly inhabited continent besides Africa present.
For the next three days I said nothing much, I just wrote and wrote and wrote – the feeling was like a lightbulb had gone in my brain and my soul was being washed with a soothing balm. Everything shared and said made so much sense, I wanted to be able to share it with the world!
Back home and I recommended Michel Odent’s books to everyone but his flowery writing and tendency to go off on tangents more often than not confused people.
“Why is he advocating for polygamous and polyandrous communities?” Someone asked me after I had lent her a copy of Birth and Breastfeeding.
Had he? ! I thought.
“Why is he going on about cats?” someone else asked.
“Why is he going on about leaving women alone while labouring? That would totally freak me out!”
Clearly the message I was trying to bring across was not necessarily coming across – how could I let people know the essence of what he was saying? The parts they really needed to know?
And so, slowly, the seeds for The Basic Needs of a Woman in Labour, were sown.
It was in 2011, nearly a year later, when I was asked to attend the birth of Paula, who lives on a farm near Nieu – Bethesda in the Eastern Cape, that I had the chance to finally gather and summarise my thoughts on the subject. I travelled there with my family and it was whilst sitting in a little cottage in the semi-desert of the Karoo, waiting for Paula’s birth, that The Basic Needs of a Woman in Labour was written.
I sent the finished copy to Liliana and Michel, who both were very happy with it and even asked if they could use it to give to the students of their doula course.
Since then, it has been sold to interested people all over the world and all pretty much through word of mouth. I have given it to medical students and left it lying around hospitals in the hope that a mother, or a midwife or doctor would find it and find the information useful. I give a copy to all my clients and there are childbirth educators in Cape Town who give it to all their attendees. At the first Cape Town Midwifery and Birth Conference in 2013 we gave them to all the delegates. A local Le Leche League sells copies of it at their meetings. Local doulas and midwives give it to their clients.
The cover illustration is inspired by Pablo Picasso’s Sleeping Woman.
I was looking for an appropriate picture for the cover but none of the images I googled for ‘Labouring Women’ seemed to convey the right message (they all looked far too stressful!). So I looked up ‘Sleeping Woman’ and came across the Picasso version of those words. The next day I was at a birth and at one point looked up to see the mother resting in-between contractions on the edge of the birthing pool. She rested her head to the side of her folded arms, her eyes closed. She looked almost identical to the image I had come across the day before. A sign?
Michel Odent has also kindly written a most humbling foreword to the book:
” There are two important published documents about birth physiology and the basic needs of labouring women. The first one is an enormous book written thousands of years ago. In the very first pages of this bestseller, there are some lines suggesting an association between the consumption of the fruit of the tree of knowledge (translate knowing too much or having developed a powerful neocortex) and the difficulties of human birth. At the end of this book, we can read about the birth of a legendary man whose mission was to promote love. His mother found a strategy to overcome the human handicap: with humility she gave birth among non-human mammals, in a stable.
The second document is the opposite of the first one in terms of size. It is a booklet by Ruth Ehrhardt. To bring together what is important in such a small number of pages is a feat. I hope that, on the five continents, all pregnant women, midwives, doulas, doctors, etc. will take the time to assimilate the contents of this chef d’oeuvre: it will be a turning point in the history of childbirth and therefore in the history of mankind.”
The book has come a long way from its humble Karoo scribblings in an exam pad and the next step seems to be to make it more available worldwide.
Hence, it is now available on Kindle as well as a paperback through Amazon in the following countries:
Now we just need to make sure we get the book translated into the languages spoken in those regions.
I reckon it’ll get there – a Portuguese copy is almost ready.
