Healing without Fear

Bernadette’s Story: Facing Death in Childbirth

This is one woman’s story about her experience with various fears, including the fear of death, during the process of giving birth to her two children. Her story is not everybody’s; it is hers. But it is a good example of how to deal with this fear.

Bernadette had two very different pregnancies and births. The first was easy, and Bernadette knew the baby was safe the whole time. The fears she carried had more to do with her own performance anxiety—would she be able to do what was necessary in the birthing process?—and the kind of welcome her daughter would receive when she appeared.

“I was concerned—would there be fear present at her birth?” remembers Bernadette. She saw herself as her daughter’s spiritual guardian, responsible for protecting her psychic space at birth. This was what ultimately made her choose a home birth, so that she could control the environment into which her daughter was born. What Bernadette wanted more than anything was for her child to be born into a field of love, something she thought was missing in her prenatal encounters at her clinic.

Bernadette’s second pregnancy was much different. She decided early on to have another home birth because of the beauty and richness of her first experience. But she experienced inner fears almost immediately during her second pregnancy. She characterizes them as “the traditional fears that mothers-to-be have—that something’s going to be wrong with their baby, that something’s going to go wrong, that something’s already gone wrong, or that something’s just not quite right, but you can’t put your finger on it.”

Though her first response to the fear was to “check out and try to ignore it,” Bernadette began working consciously with her fears. She found physical support in various kinds of bodywork and discovered that she could “breathe into” some of the unconscious lingering fears from her first labor and let them move through and out of her body. She also recognized the need to admit her fears to her husband and ask him for help. “Then it really shifted, and the second trimester was very different.”

In her second trimester, Bernadette’s fears had to do with misinformation—inaccuracies that were recorded in her chart and could have jeopardized her plans for a home birth. Though the midwives eventually caught all the mistakes, Bernadette had to live with the fear for several days each time.

In the third trimester, the fears were about the baby’s heart tones, which began to dip. Heart tones are the sounds made by heart valves opening and closing during each heart-beat; this is the “lubb-dupp” that you hear when you put your ear against someone else’s chest. Bernadette resolutely held on to the plan for a home birth, knowing that some people would consider her crazy for doing so. In fact, she says, “We got kicked out [of our clinic] in the ninth month of prenatal care. They told us we couldn’t see midwives [for our check-ups] if we were doing a home birth; we had to see a doctor. So there I am, naked on the examination table, and she comes in and tells me, ‘I’m sorry, we can’t care for you.’”

Bernadette chalked this up to the clinic’s fear of liability problems. Her husband panicked at the news but she remained calm, telling him, “We have to focus on the baby; we have no extra energy to get caught up in that fear. Stay on track.” She was convinced that she could have this baby at home, so she found another clinic that would support her decision. “Had we gone into fear and let that run the decisions throughout the whole pregnancy, then we would have done a hospital birth, and the birth would have been very different; it probably would have been a C-section.”

Bernadette points out that either choice would have yielded a safe, albeit very different, delivery. But she believes that “if there’s fear and there might be a problem, then you should go where those fears are going to be calmed.” For her, calm came from processing the fear and listening deeply to the baby in her womb. “If I hadn’t done that, we would have gone and gotten more tests and done a lot more medical intervention, and rather than helping, in . . . our case, it would have fueled the fear more and it would have altered the course of all our decisions to follow. We would have been listening to the information outside of ourselves rather than what we needed to keep listening to, which was the baby, who was talking to us and the midwives. That’s hard to do. When you’re in such a vulnerable place you just want to go to an expert and say, ‘Tell me what to do.’”

Shortly before her due date, Bernadette had a friend come over to listen to her as she named all of the fears she had been through during the pregnancy. “I just wanted to say out loud—to someone who could witness it—what the fears were, because I hadn’t really done that. I hadn’t wanted to talk about them too much because I didn’t want to give them more power, so a lot of them I dealt with on my own during the pregnancy. As I’d be lying in bed at night . . . I would do my own thing where I would visualize the fear getting smaller, and my power getting greater; maybe surround [the fear] in light, or send it away.”

Bernadette feels strongly that all of this work allowed her to deal with what eventually came: a turning point during her labor when she needed to decide whether to remain at home or be transported to the hospital. “I think if I hadn’t faced the fears all along, worked with them and gotten help and support, transformed them, and used them as a catalyst they would have all come up in that split second. It could have clouded everything then. But I knew exactly what I needed to do, [to go to the hospital in the middle of labor], and exactly what help I needed to ask for inside myself and outside myself. I have never been so clear in my life. [In the hospital] I was saying [to the doctors and nurses and midwives], ‘I need you to do this, and you to do this.’ I would go into the letting go, and I would come out and . . . it was like being in charge and out of control at the same time. When it’s a life-or-death choice you really want to be able to call on that ability.”

Bernadette is really in touch with her own inner wisdom, and she uses it along with external information to create her own birthing experiences. She regularly works with and breathes through any fears that arise in order to keep coming back to herself. This power is available to us all, especially with the love and support or simple witnessing of others.

After listening deeply, Bernadette followed her instinct with such certainty that her requests or commands were followed, even in the emergency room of a hospital where the voice of the physician is usually sacrosanct. While not all of us will be able to achieve the level of confidence and decisiveness of Bernadette, particularly in the face of a scary situation, we can look to her as an example. And we can use her as an ally in our visualizations, as we imagine those who have gone before us.