Now What - A mediation on the elevation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

My head hurts.  Not because the confirmation hearings for Mr. Kavanaugh produced dialogue about gender equality or sexual assault that's over due.  Not because many women are - perhaps for the first time - willing to take on the patriarchy.  And not because Mitch McConnell proved again that he doesn't really care about anything other then power.

No, it hurts because so many of my fellow Americans have reduced all this a simple statement:

We Won!
or to another simple statement:

Suck it Libtards!
No matter the evidence that Mr. Kavanaugh is not fit to sit on the Supreme Court - and there were questions about him perjuring himself before the Blasey-Ford hearing - no matter that he is a partisan jurist who will be an "activist judge;' and leaving aside the fact that going into the second hearing the Senate Judiciary Committee was actually aware of 7 allegations against him (making it a He Said They Said no a He Said She Said) as it was billed; and never mind Mr. McConnell's disastrous silencing of Judge Merrick Garland - what the folks on the right love above all else is stick it to the left.

They don't care that their own voting rights might eventually curtailed - as long as the Left looses. They don't care that their healthcare costs will go back up - as long as the Leftlooses.  They don't care about a Trillion dollar deficit - as long as the Left looses.  They don't care about the end of medically safe abortions for women of lower economic means - as long as the Left looses. They don't care about clean air or clean water - as long as the Left looses.

And they certainly don't care about adhering to teachings of the Christ they all claim for themselves - as long as the Left looses.

If You Are in Awe of the Duchess of Cambridge, You Don’t Know Modern Birth

CNN’s AJ Willingham wrote on April 23rd about the “Awe” expressed by so many in the fact that Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, walked out of the hospital 7 hours after giving birth to her third child.  The Duchess has done this sort of thing twice before, and it seemed so . . . magical . . . mythical . . . unmodern to so many commentators, both women and men.

Now yes, as Ms. Willingham points out the Duchess has a great many advantages – from ambulances and police escorts and on-call doctors; to stylists and nannies – that the vast majority of women lack.  Catherine has also had a great many challenges in all her pregnancies, as she battled through bouts of “hyperemises gravidarium during the early stages of all three of her pregnancies. The condition causes severe nausea and vomiting, and can pose serious health risks.” Yes, child birth can be exhausting and yes, three kids into my own marriage and I can assure you it’s sometimes messy.

But where Ms. Willingham gets it wrong – as do far too many people in today’s world (including rafts of expectant mothers) - is that the challenges of birth itself is some sort of debilitating CONDITION that must be treated or alleviated. Instead, understood properly and prepared for with gusto, you really can arrive at a childbirth experience that gets you out of the hospital in a red dress looking like you just won an award.  Which you did.  By giving birth.

To understand how we got here, you have to look at how medicine is practiced in the “Western” world – and more specifically in the US.  Just a glance at the terminology that is associated with birth in most medical settings is a serious clue – American medicine speaks of birth as “labor” wherein you can get medication for “relief” of “pain.” Labor is “induced” as an “intervention.” Doctors demand the “right” to monitor women and their babies with often restrictive ultrasound harnesses – despite a growing body of evidence that said monitoring actually increases anxiety in mothers, slows the birth process, and increases the occurrence of C-Sections (Which are major, painful and invasive surgeries). At one time many woman even sought out drug cocktails called Twilight Sleep to medically induce amnesia so as to forget the challenges of birth.

And yet . . . many women – like my wife – choose to take control of their birth experience just as they take control of their reproductive rights, their careers, their finances and their relationships.  They increasingly choose – as we did – to birth with a midwife or in a birth center away from a hospital so that birth can be the natural, empowering experience it has always been.  In that regard the Duchess is well ahead of the game:

Though still a relative novelty in the U.S., midwife-led maternity care is the norm in other developed countries, including most of Europe.* In England, for example, midwives are the lead care providers at more than half of all births. (There, midwife care is considered fit even for royalty; last month Kate Middleton gave birth to her daughter Charlotte under the care of two midwives.) “In England, what they say is, ‘Every mother deserves a midwife, and some need an obstetrician, too,’” Declercq says.

In addition many pregnant woman are taking advantage of things like Hypnobabies (which we used twice), a national program that, through meditation-like practices, exercises in visualization, and practice between the woman and her partner – aim to transform both the woman’s birth experience AND her perceptions. These approaches don’t take away any of the physical stress in the pregnant woman’s body.  They do, however, better prepare a woman to thrive in the birth experience and emerge just as the Duchess did.

So go ahead, be in awe.  But know that as a woman – or the birth or life partner of a woman – you too can achieve a similar outcome when you birth.  And that means you can emerge from the hospital 7 hours later in a red dress (thankfully without the cameras) to go do the important work of raising good humans.