Dancing with Death In the Birth Space

Midwifery for the People

Join Margo on this exploratory first part of a series on death and navigating our relationship to it as birth workers. If we want to shift the cultural narrative so that we honor birth as a right of passage, we will also need to reimagine death as a right of passage. The Western medical perspective is that death is the ultimate defeat. That often means there is someone or something to blame. On our quest to eliminate death from the pregnancy and birth continuum (which is ultimately the aim of “evidence based midwifery” and medicine) what do we lose? Is this the right goal? Or do we need to ask different questions to come up with different solutions for living and birthing in a sacred way?