Tag: natural birth

Interviews & Conversations Projects Women I've Shot

Positive Birth in South Africa: This is Thea Hurenkamp

Post author By Leah
Post date January 17, 2016
No Comments on Positive Birth in South Africa: This is Thea Hurenkamp

The Gate-Keepers: A Portraiture Project

This is a portraiture project, documenting the “gatekeepers” of a growing movement regarding positive birth experiences in our country. My aim: to promote those who are enabling women to identify with their power and femininity and therefore normalize birth and the body.

These are their stories / anecdotes / opinions about what they do and how they see it…accompanied by my portraits and some general information on each sitter.

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Thea Hurenkamp has been a doula for close on two years. She has a past in teaching, marketing and social work. Thea works predominantly in the CBD and Northern Suburbs of Cape Town.

“One of the most important aspects of my Doula work, as I see it, is to talk about birth more – just talk! It’s what women do best. It’s connection. The more we talk about birth as an empowering and natural phenomenon, the more we shed light. All fear lives in silence and darkness.”

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“My opinion is that there is so much fear in both the public and private sectors. We seem to have lost our collective trust in the process and in the birthing woman.
It manifests in different ways: emotional, verbal and physical abuse from care providers, coercion, hasty and often unnecessary intervention, elected caesarean births – and I think these manifestations will continue until women feel empowered enough to challenge it.
I don’t believe it is a problem unique to South Africa but we definitely have a host of aggravating factors to deal with concurrently which makes progress slow. I would like to see more emphasis placed on fostering trust, respect, compassion and empowerment in the birth space. Research shows us that when our women feel safe they birth better and our children don’t deserve to be born into fear.”

–

“As a young woman I faced childbirth for the first time with absolutely no preparation from the women in my family. Nobody ever spoke about it. Ever. All I had to go by was the media and my vivid imagination. By some stroke of luck I was blessed with incredibly gentle team of care providers who guided me through it with such respect for my authority over my body and I emerged on the other side feeling strong and in awe of my ability.
It’s something I want more women to know about and to experience – that’s what being a Doula means to me.”

• (I invite more participants to join the project, you are welcome to email me for more information).

Tags birth in south africa, birthing professionals south africa, doulas south africa, home birth in south africa, interviews with doulas, interviews with midwives, midwifery and birth conference south africa, midwives south africa, natural birth, normalizing birth, portraits of doulas, portraits of midwives, positive birth movement, positive birth south africa, pregnancy south africa, south african midwives, Thea Hurenkamp, woman's issues in south africa

Interviews & Conversations Projects Women I've Shot

Positive Birth in South Africa: This is Gayle Friedman

Post author By Leah
Post date January 16, 2016
No Comments on Positive Birth in South Africa: This is Gayle Friedman

The Gate-Keepers: A Portraiture Project

These are their stories / anecdotes / opinions about what they do and how they see it…accompanied by my portraits and some general information on each sitter.

–

Gayle has been in health care for over 30 years and been a doula for 8 years. She specializes in color therapy and is also a qualified aromatherapist, reflexologist and yoga instructor. She works in areas between the Atlantic Seaboard, CBD and Southern Suburbs of Cape Town.

“I myself have had three home births but I choose to work in actual medical hospitals because someone has to hold the spiritual, psychological, emotional space for women to relax, feel safe and calm so that their brain/body can do what it knows- Let go, breathe out and let babies be born.”

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“If I could see some statistics change? It would be for South African women to have more vaginal births.”

• (I invite more participants to join the project, you are welcome to email me for more information).

Tags birth in south africa, birthing professionals south africa, doulas south africa, Gayle Friedman, home birth in south africa, interviews with doulas, interviews with midwives, midwifery and birth conference south africa, midwives south africa, natural birth, normalizing birth, portraits of doulas, portraits of midwives, positive birth movement, positive birth south africa, pregnancy south africa, south african midwives, woman's issues in south africa

Interviews & Conversations Projects Women I've Shot

Positive Birth in South Africa: This is Joy King

Post author By Leah
Post date January 15, 2016
No Comments on Positive Birth in South Africa: This is Joy King

The Gate-Keepers: A Portraiture Project

These are their stories / anecdotes / opinions about what they do and how they see it…accompanied by my portraits and some general information on each sitter.

–

Joy is a doula. She works predominantly in Cape Towns city centre and the South Peninsula areas. She has been a doula for three years now.
Joy is a member of The Birth Hub where she is an antenatal course facilitator and one of the doula’s making up the team, she is a also a qualified Shiatsu Therapist. Apart from her work with women, Joy feels strongly about education and how to make change come about from the roots up.

This is what inspires Joy about being involved in birthing in South Africa…

“Besides my chosen vocation, I am also a mother to three daughters. If anything motivates me to change beliefs around femininity, womanhood, pregnancy and birth, it is them.
I look forward to the day where the instinct inherent in women is respected and honored; where women’s desire to trust their bodies is held in high regard.”

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“Sex education at schools should be changed to be inclusive of the love and trust of the feminine. Without this positive education, women become mothers surrounded by fear and distrust rather than love and faith. This must change for a healthier, more peaceful future for our descendants. This must Change.”

• (I invite more participants to join the project, you are welcome to email me for more information).

Tags birth in south africa, birthing professionals south africa, doulas south africa, home birth in south africa, interviews with doulas, interviews with midwives, Joy King, midwifery and birth conference south africa, midwives south africa, natural birth, normalizing birth, portraits of doulas, portraits of midwives, positive birth movement, positive birth south africa, pregnancy south africa, south african midwives, woman's issues in south africa

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A Documentary Series:
More Business of Being Born – S.1, E.2
Celebrity Birth Stories

Post author By Leah
Post date October 26, 2015
No Comments on A Documentary Series:
More Business of Being Born – S.1, E.2
Celebrity Birth Stories

Celebrity Birth Stories, Episode 2 of a 4 part series

The duo (Abby Epstein and Ricki Lake) host the informative TV series More Business of Being Born (2011). It’s a follow-on to a documentary they produced together in 2008 titled “The Business of Being Born”, which explored contemporary child birthing experiences in the U.S.

In this second episode they discuss the expectations, doubts, fears, labours and experiences of motherhood with a selection of celebrities.

A friend of mine, when I was about 20 weeks pregnant, invited me to go to a yoga class with Gurmukh. And in that class Gurmukh really starts reminding us that we are not sick when we are pregnant, if anything, she’s like “You’re actually stronger when you’re pregnant. Why would it work that God, or whatever you believe in, would make you weaker?”. You are stronger! Women have been giving birth naturally you know, for gazillions of years.
–Cindy Crawford

I wanted to pull quite a few quotes from the episode because I was impressed to hear these women had such particular opinions regarding birth.
Some quotes are below and some are incorporated into the screen grabs I took whilst watching the documentary.

I never wanted to have a hospital birth. I didn’t want to be induced. I didn’t want to have any interventions at all. I wasn’t so sure about the idea of a home birth necessarily but I did have some friends who had had home births so I knew of it because of them.
-Christy Turlington Burns

I like to have goals and I like to reach my goals and, interestingly, giving birth naturally was a very big goal for me. And I think that it was partly that my mom gave birth naturally so I was like “I can do it!”.
If my mom can do it, I can totally do it.
-Kellie Martin

Christy Turlington Burns (left) & Kellie Martin (right).

One of the women interviewed, Laila Ali, was incredibly passionate and pro home birth, against the grain of all those surrounding her who had very different opinions and were preferring hospitalised birth and selective surgery.

Interviewees talk about how much negative influence, specifically from their obstetricians/doctors, had on their pregnancy and birth experience as well as their feelings of safety and trust in their own bodies ability to do this thing. Because of this most of them had opted to educate themselves and have natural or home births.

I love all three above images, especially the middle which is of Brazilian Giselle Bundchen, with their new borns.
The women discuss their birthing experiences, most of which are very positive and empowering, although Morissette (below) explains, rather comically, how hard it had been up until the moment she was holding her baby in her arms.

I was as “prepared” as a woman could possibly be …and there was nothing that could prepare me for it! Nope.
And I’d watched all the videos of the women going into the field and giving birth to they own children. And that wasn’t so much my experience.

– Alanis Morissette

So much amazing wisdom from these very different and highly influential women. Their very pro-active approach to knowledge and education was one of the most inspiring aspects of the documentary.

It is the most empowering experience ever… You’re deeply inside yourself but you’re also outside of yourself in the experience of labor and I think you get to actually look at your self and go,”Wow, look what I can do! Look what I’m made to be able to do! What an amazing thing!”I mean it gives you such an appreciation and a value in yourself which I think for women is really hard. In our culture too there’s such a self-loathing thing that happens and people aren’t happy and its always like “I can be better and I should look better”. To know that just by the nature of who you are and how you were made you’re able to do the most incredible thing ever. It just puts things into perspective in a way that think nothing else can.
-Christy Turlington Burns

Tags birth, birth philosophy, birth stories, celebrity birth stories, cindy crawford, home birth, labour, more on the business of being born, natural birth