How We Started…excerpted from Spiritual Midwifery
Our first baby was a fine boy, born in his parent’s schoolbus-camper in the parking lot at Northwestern University—the first birth I had ever seen- Just as Stephen was preparing to go into the lecture hall at Northwestern to address an audience of several hundred people, the baby’s father came over to our bus to ask for Stephen’s assistance at the birth. (Stephen had had combat experience with the Marines in Korea, where he received first-aid training and dealt with some life and death situations as a result. Because of this he was regarded as the most qualified person among us to attend a birth.) Knowing that he had to go ahead with his lecture, I volunteered to help at the birth.
The entire labor and birth lasted only three hours or so. I was no midwife at the time, but I was able to help the mother stay relaxed during this quick labor. I was struck by how beautiful this woman looked while she was laboring. The father actually “caught” the baby, who came out easily and started breathing by himself. There were no complications of any kind with mother or baby. I was in a state of amazement for several days. I had never seen a newborn baby before (my baby was almost a day old before I was allowed to see her), and I was struck with how perfect this baby looked, right from the time he took his first breath.
I felt a definite calling to be a midwife, but my Master’s degree in English had not prepared me for anything so real life as a birth. It was during the second birth on the Caravan that I began to realize more fully the responsibility that goes with being a midwife. I saw that if I made any mistakes, or if I let any mistakes happen in my presence, I was going to have to live with them for the rest of my life. I began to study whatever I could find
about pregnancy and childbirth.
My first real training in the essentials of midwifery was given to me and one cf my first assistants, Margaret, following the birth of the third Caravan baby, my first actual delivery. Dr. Louis La Pete, a Rhode Island obstetrician who had read in the newspapers about the Caravan and its births when we passed through there, took the trouble to come and visit us where we were parked. He gave Margaret and me a hands-on seminar on how to recognize any complications we were likely to encounter and what to do if we did, demonstrating how to stimulate a baby to breathe, what to do if the umbilical cord was wrapped tightly around the baby’s neck, what to do if the mother hemorrhaged. He taught us sterile technique and provided us with some necessary medications and instruments, my first obstetrics textbook and gave us instructions on how to provide good prenatal care. It was a great blessing to have met such an understanding obstetrician when we did, because what he taught Margaret and me enabled us to safely deal with the complications that came up in the very next birth on the Caravan. The cord was tightly wrapped around this baby’s neck, the baby didn’t breathe spontaneously and needed suctioning and stimulation to get him going, and the mother hemorrhaged following the expulsion of the placenta. We got the baby breathing, and stopped the mother’s bleeding, immensely grateful for the training and courage we had absorbed from our friend.
The excitement generated by each Caravan birth was contagious. Each mother who gave birth became an inspiring and encouraging example
to the other women. We came to look at birth as a sort of initiation or rite of passage— something for which you could gather up your courage with the help of your friends and contemporaries. (Even though more than half of the women during the first seven or eight years of our midwifery experience were having their first babies, they were able to give birth with the same help and encouragement that the others had.) Those who had given birth in hospitals were unanimous about how much easier and how much less painful it seemed to give birth in one’s own bed than in the hospital.
As we traveled, we had common experiences and began to know each other better. when each birth took place, we all parked in a sort of
protective formation around the bus in which the birth would take place, and everyone waited for the baby’s first cry. It wasn’t until the two Wyoming births that we really had to deal with extreme weather while a labor was happening. It was early March, and the temperature was below zero every day, twenty degrees below at night. The differential on our schoolbus shattered when we tried to push start it on the first bitter cold morning. Another bus towed ours to Buck’s Garage in Rock Springs so we could have a new rear end installed. It was relatively cozy inside the garage, but outside, where everyone else was parked, the winter winds whipped across the high plains, making it nearly impossible to keep warm in the schoolbuses, which were heated only by tiny woodstoves.
Two women went into labor at once; one who had given birth before and my current partner, Pamela, who was having her first baby. Up to
then, we hadn’t had any really long, drawn out labors, and Pamela seemed so strong, healthy and eager for the birth that I expected her to give birth quickly. She didn’t. A full twenty-four hours passed, with very little dilation. She ate and drank as usual, as did all the laboring mothers who didn’t give birth within five or six hours. Still, the baby’s heart rate sounded fine, and Pamela looked healthy, though tired. By the end of the second day I was getting worried. Stephen and I began to wonder if Pamela had anything on her mind that was bothering her. I asked her, and she said that one thought had kept coming up. She wondered if her husband was going to stay with her for life. when they had married, they had had one of those new age ceremonies in which they had written their own vows. Neither Pamela nor her husband had wanted to mention “death” in their marriage vows, as in the phrase “till death do you part.” Their pastor at that ceremony had thought this omission was a little strange, but he didn’t argue with the young couple. When I heard about Pamela’s concern, it felt significant, and I went inside the garage to our bus and mentioned it to Stephen. He had already been functioning as pastor of our group, and he volunteered to marry them on the spot. He said the vows, and Pamela and her husband repeated them after him, including “as long as we both shall live.” She then labored on for three or four hours, but it was immediately obvious after the impromptu ceremony that she was making real progress now. When her son was born, Pamela and I talked about how he hadn’t wanted to come out until his parents were properly married. The second Rock Springs baby was born very easily just a few hours after Pamela’s son arrived.
My next strong lesson in midwifery came on the tenth birth on the Caravan— that of my own baby. Just before we reached Nebraska on our way to Tennessee to buy land, I started labor two months before my due date. My rushes were light, so we decided to drive on across Nebraska. As it turned out, we had to stop in North Platte for a couple of days because of a blizzard. I’ll never forget how kind the people there were; they brought us boxes and boxes of bread, milk and eggs. All this time I was trying to keep the rushes at a minimum, but by the third day it became obvious that I was going to give birth pretty soon. We had driven on from North Platte, and we found a place to park the buses for one night in Grand Island, and Stephen, with Margaret’s assistance, caught my boy a few hours later. He was tiny—three pounds or less—and had extreme difficulty breathing right from the first. He lived for twelve hours, enough to see the light of day, and then he died in my arms, probably of hyaline membrane disease, the most common cause of death in premature babies in those days. I was filled with grief. At the same time, I knew he had taught me something I was never going to forget. I was also relieved that if we had to lose a baby that it was mine and not somebody else’s. But it still took me several months—in fact, until the birth of my next child—to heal from the grief I felt at his death.
I learned a lot from those first few births I attended on the Caravan. Altogether, there were eleven babies born while we were on the road: one in Illinois, one in Michigan, one in New York, one in Nashville, one in Kansas City, Missouri, two at rest stops in California, two in Rock Springs, Wyoming, one in Grand Island, Nebraska, and one at Percy Priest Park near Nashville. All are indelibly engraved in my memory.
Ina May Gaskin