Early in my career as a homebirth midwife and childbirth educator, I questioned the moral and ethical dilemma of whether a newborn baby should be allowed to die from natural causes at home or be kept artificially alive in a hospital. I began practicing midwifery in the mid to late 1970s when free-standing birthing centers had not yet become an option. Labor and delivery rooms became “birthing rooms,” but the sign over the door is the only thing that changed. Practices and procedures that turned low-risk women into high-risk continued behind closed doors.
In good conscience, I could not follow the rules put in place by a male-dominated medical system that put women at risk. For a low-risk woman, giving birth is a natural process, not a medical procedure needing intervention. Women should have the right to choose a home birth attended by trained professionals. A low-risk woman increases her risk factor the moment she walks through hospital doors.
The same rules that increase a woman’s risk are the same ones that require her to birth and raise a child that otherwise would have died of natural causes before, during, or shortly after birth. Some people would agree that raising a severely handicapped child is a hardship for everyone involved and that it places a heavy burden on society and the family. Wouldn’t a year of grieving the loss of her child and bearing the scar left on her heart be better than a lifetime of compromises, suffering, and tears? Are we not more empowered when we trust the wisdom of nature and our inner guidance than white coats who gallop in to rescue us – from what? These questions plague and haunt me to this day.
Practicing out-of-hospital midwifery gave me the freedom to support low-risk women making a personal choice not to give their power away to a mechanistic medical system. The mechanistic model does not address the whole person and demands compliance. That can have disastrous results in a setting where machines dictate what a woman may be experiencing, and the doctor becomes credited with the outcome. A disempowered new mother may not make the best choices for herself or her newborn.
Many of my clients in the late 70s and early 80s practiced east Indian spirituality, yoga, and vegetarianism. We were considered counter-culture, but we laid the groundwork for what would become popular culture over thirty years later, except for home birth.
Fear is a powerful motivator. Western Medicine, and its practitioners, are adept at instilling fear in patients. Many sick people rush into procedures and drugs that may not be in their best interest. FDA-approved drugs kill over 100,000 Americans each year. The FDA pretends to protect the public while harassing those who offer safe alternatives. An even more shocking statistic is that the total number of deaths caused by medical errors in the U.S. is more than 250,000 per year.
Statistics support the safety of homebirth, but fear drives women into the hospitals. Fear also informs legislation that limits out-of-hospital birth options while obstetricians actively seek to suppress home births. Big Pharma educates doctors through its financial support of medical universities and affiliated teaching hospitals while funding research and suppressing safe and effective alternatives that threaten profits. In the last 40 years, what has changed is how powerful the pharmaceutical lobby has become and Big Pharma’s success in gaining control of the mainstream media through its advertising dollars.
“The more we allow the regulation and control of our food and our medicine, the more we lose control over our individual choices and personal freedoms. If we choose to continue to allow ourselves to be robbed of these choices because we fear the processes of life and death, we will lose that which is essential to being human — free will and sovereignty.”
— From Wisdom of the Plant Devas: Herbal Medicine for a New Earth by Thea Summer Deer
As a childbirth educator, I started teaching vaccine awareness over 40 years ago. I gave parents information from both sides of the argument, to vaccinate or not to vaccinate so they could make an informed choice. Today, due to extensive censorship campaigns, this is sadly no longer possible. We have managed to give away enough power to the medical cartel that we are now losing our choices in health care and our medical freedoms. Our health care system is being held hostage by the money interests and immune system hijacked by vaccine profiteers. And it all starts at birth.
Newborns rely on passive immunity from maternal antibodies for approximately three months following birth while being further protected by their mother’s milk. The neonate’s passive and natural immunities may become compromised through premature birth, surgical birth, mother-infant separation, reduced skin-to-skin contact, skin sterilization, and failure to breastfeed. A lack of stimulation, and an altered microbiome after a cesarean section, have a profound impact on a newborn’s immune system. Vaccines launched into an immature immune system as part of an immunization campaign add insult to the injury.
The innate immune system is the defense system with which you were born. Innate immunity involves barriers that keep harmful things from entering your body. These barriers are the first line of defense in an immune response and what is known as the surface immune system in herbalism. Vaccines reprogram, suppress, and override innate immune responses.
The deep immune system in herbalism is called Jing in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Jing corresponds with the Water Element. The Jing forms the essence of who and what we are and governs our reproductive potential and ability to handle illness. Pre-natal Jing is the genetic inheritance we received from our ancestors and what we will pass down to the next seven generations. Our ancestor’s struggles, the diseases they survived, and the natural immunity they acquired are all encoded within us. In one generation, we are at risk of losing this immunity with the development of gene therapies and extensive immunization schedules. Is this how we honor our ancestors? Vaccines disrupt at the level of the Jing. All pharmaceuticals overheat the Liver (Wood Element), which depletes the Water Element.
The Water Element corresponds to the kidneys and adrenals. It is a yin element. Our modern yang-driven society depletes the Jing, exhausts our adrenals, and compromises our immunity, vitality, and longevity. If we do not protect the Jing, future generations will not survive in a sterile, vaccine-dependent world. Other things that repress immunity are fever reducers and antibiotics. If a person is healthy and the body not allowed the fire of fever to burn off pathogens, then an acute symptom turns into a chronic pattern. The fever is not the offender, nor is the infection. They only serve to expel the offender. The offender is not an invader to be defended against.
When illness becomes the enemy, instead of the effort to restore balance to the body, we lose sight of how to guide the body through illness to its healthful conclusion. That is true on all levels when we make anything an enemy to be fought against. We have lost our guides while being taught to live in fear of the wild and unpredictable power of nature. It is a power with the ability heal and transform. Supporting body wisdom to express through illness with Medicine rather than to suppress through knowledge of pharmaceuticals is the difference between healing and heroics. Medicine in this context becomes whatever supports healing: physical, spiritual, or otherwise.
The goal is to see an illness to its natural conclusion, which is a restoration of health, just as the earth is restored after the cold, hard, expression of winter and the erratic expression of spring. The earth doesn’t defend herself against winter: she merely makes adjustments and is supported by the elements to do so. When the body is not supported to heal itself and see illness through to its natural conclusion, disease results, and sometimes this can occur through generations of genetically encoded imbalance.
The indigenous peoples of the earth have always understood how this principle of healing works and what it means to let nature take its course. We can no longer think our way through life or an illness. Thinking allows us to perceive only ideas, while the intelligence of nature allows us to perceive the entire universe.
The moral and ethical dilemmas remain. Who should be allowed to live, and who should be allowed to die? I hold a vision for the future that includes co-creating with nature and imagining: What else might be possible?
Learn more about Jing in the online course Hidden Treasure: Kidney Essence & the Water Element
References:
- Altered microbiome after caesarean section impacts baby’s immune system
- Research suggests Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine reprograms innate immune responses
- New Prescription Drugs: A Major Health Risk With Few Offsetting Advantages
- Study Suggests Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death in the U.S.
Wisdom of the Plant Devas 