The birth of Maryanne’s first child was a forceps delivery that left her badly injured. Her second baby was born with a chromosomal abnormality incompatible with life. She could survive only two or three days at most. From her hospital bed, Maryanne heard nurses updating each other as they were changing shift, wondering aloud if her baby had died yet.

The birth of her third child, my daughter’s friend, was a more positive experience but it wasn’t without interventions. “They were all either performed on me, or I felt coerced into accepting them,” Maryanne recalled. “It wasn’t the kind of birth I wanted for myself or my baby.”

These experiences led Maryanne to start researching safe, non-invasive alternatives to hospital birth. She joined an organization called Friends of the Midwives (FOM), a consumer group founded to support the Midwives Association of Saskatchewan (MAS) in that organization’s efforts to persuade the government of Saskatchewan to legalize midwifery in the province. The two volunteer-run groups worked closely together, sharing resources and coordinating their message. A year or so later, Maryanne recruited me to write and produce the FOM’s newsletter. I didn’t join FOM, but obviously I soon began to learn a lot about the history of childbirth, and the past, present, and hoped-for future of midwifery.

When Maryanne became pregnant with baby number four, she knew she wanted to avoid as many medical procedures as she could.

She had learned how fear and anxiety during labour can lead to an increase in physical tension that can slow the process down, sometimes dangerously. If this happens, the need for medical intervention rises. Unfortunately, interventions such as inductions often increase, rather than decrease, anxiety, physical tension and, consequently, pain. Modern pain medication may not have a lasting harmful effect on the baby, but the effects are not inconsequential, either.

Maryanne also knew, from research done by the midwifery movement, that women who labour with the support of a professionally trained midwife often report reduced anxiety, reduced physical tension, and consequently can perceive pain less severely. Labour and delivery can proceed at a manageable pace and intensity, to an outcome that is gentler on both mother and baby.

We hadn’t yet succeeded in convincing the provincial government to allow midwives to deliver babies in the hospital, let alone at home, but midwives were allowed to be present as support for the mother. In the end, Maryanne had Ilaria in the hospital but, with her midwife at her side, the birth was the positive, empowering experience she had hoped for.

Those experiences, negative and positive, and the growing body of research indicating that a modern home birth, attended by a professionally trained midwife, was a safe option for the type of low-risk pregnancy Maryanne had experienced with her third and fourth babies, prompted her to start wondering what childbirth had been like for our mothers and grandmothers.