“Our fear of birth is as elemental as our fear of death. Our society’s medicalized resistance to natural death is mirrored in our medicalized avoidance of natural birth. We treat birth as a dramatic medical emergency because we lack the patience and faith in nature to allow for a natural and individual birth process. We are afraid of the dangers but we are also afraid of the mystery. Our society mistrusts what comes out of women as much as what goes in. It teaches us that we must be augmented in order to function, dishonouring the fact that real female power is nothing less than the power to risk death to bring forth new life.”

Rachel Webster