Medicine cannot accept simplicity. It intervenes to complicate matters, making out that to bear a child is to risk either suicide or infanticide

-Vinita Mansata

Sanitised hospital surroundings or a warm loving environment? Mammas-to-be giving birth or doctors delivering babies? As more and more urban women exercise the highly individual choice of celebrating the arrival of their offspring in the comfort of their residences or at holistic centres, some pertinent questions arise concerning privacy and safe motherhood. Meher Marfatia hears voices from both sides

It began as a regular morning for Vinita Mansata. Her second child due any time, she dropped her son Rishabh to school, finished grocery shopping, then returned to her Mumbai apartment where Sitabai the midwife waited. Short hours later, she delivered a beautiful baby. Relaxed, in her bedroom. Without a doctor. Disillusioned by a typical Caesarean section eight years before, Mansata had opted to have her next child at home. “Medicine cannot accept simplicity. It intervenes to complicate matters, making out that to bear a child is to risk either suicide or infanticide,” she says. Refusing to undergo the usual barrage of prior tests listed for expectant mothers, she was aware of starting mild labour en route school earlier in the day.

Over a year ago, Vrinda Natesh’s delivery refuelled the debate. Her decision to home birth her baby in suburban Mumbai sparked fresh argument over hospital labour for expectant mothers. Natesh acted against gynaecologists pressuring her into a Caesarean procedure just two days past her estimated date. Not only did she and her husband wait beyond, without induced labour, they were happy to have their older children watch “the celebration” too.

This is exactly how Navina Venkat-Sondergaard preferred introducing her baby to the world. Describing her comfort level with 11 people in the room when the child was born, she says, “Birth is a climactic experience. It has to happen in a warm, loving environment. My family and closest friends ensured that my baby came into a totally receiving atmosphere. Why must medicine only question what goes wrong, rather than create practices raising awareness to welcome new life naturally?”

It’s about giving nature a goodish chance. Going on to safely home birth another healthy boy, Sanghvi stresses the importance of a long-cocooned baby being ushered out of the sheltering womb into an equally gentle ambience with dimmed lighting and constant temperature rather than the blinding harsh glare and ice-cold freeze in operating theatres. Says her husband, Sanjay, of their shared experience: “She had such faith in this alternative that I was ready to stand by her at every step.”

Sanghvi, Venkat-Sondergaard, Mansata and Natesh are unique only to the extent that they represent upper middle class urban mothers who bravely brush aside previous conditioning. “Otherwise, women in rural India have traditionally borne children most matter-of-factly, even while working in fields in the middle of nowhere. Sadly, small town women are switching to hospitals,” Sanghvi observes.

On the contrary, “It’s the maternity ward routine that’s the true shocker,” feels Rashmi Palkhivala, who conducts prenatal classes focused on natural birthing with adapted yogic asanas and has also had her babies at home. “A woman becomes vulnerable, prepped for hospital delivery with a shave, drip and enema before being strapped to a bed or knocked unconscious for scheduled surgery. She’s treated downright inhumanly. This humiliation is dished out to supposedly ‘help’ what flows so instinctively from every woman’s body.

Easy Does It

Run by a German midwife, a birthing centre in Goa offers holistic maternity care In the heart of the village of Assagao in North Goa lies a simple but charming house built in the traditional Portuguese style with a lush garden in the backyard. You would never imagine the excitement that goes on inside…. Run by a German midwife, Corinna Stahlhofen, this house plays home to a birthing centre that offers a personalised, holistic and family-centred perspective on maternity care.

While the centre does not work in concurrence with hospitals, it does follow medical parameters to determine the normalcy of the pregnancy up to the time of birth. Medical equipment is always present on standby but the focus is on providing a home-like, comfortable environment to ease in the birth of the baby. The mother, in labour, is encouraged to walk around and choose her place of birth, be it the birthing room in its reassuring simplicity, the water birth room in its vivid hues or even in the shade of a jackfruit tree in the garden!

- Arati Menon-Carroll

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