While giving birth might be a scary thought to some young women, the Midwifery Club recently celebrated the beauty of the experience by inviting mothers to share their stories with young women on campus.
On Feb. 11, the Midwifery Education Club hosted six mothers in the Mauck Residence solarium to share their birthing stories. Melanie Taylor, Casey Gregg, Mary Strecker, Bryna Destafani, Emma Lindley, and Mary Margaret Spiteri addressed the trials, joys, and fears of giving birth.
The Midwifery Education Club was founded a year ago by junior Sophia Berryhill and senior Phoebe Fink to encourage women who were interested in midwifery as a career after college.
“We really wanted to start the conversation about birth and midwifery and all of the encompassing topics,” Berryhill said. “A lot of that was getting community women involved.”
The event was something Berryhill, the club’s president, and Fink, its vice president, have wanted to host since they founded the club.
“I think it’s so important to talk about this, because it’s something people don’t talk about very openly, and people feel afraid or scared and don’t know what to expect,” Berryhill said. “No one has ever talked to them before about their birth experience.”
The women talked about their experience, focusing not only on the physical experiences but also the impact it had on their emotional and spiritual life.
“What really struck me was that birthing isn’t just a physical thing that happens, you’ve got a whole body, whole-person experience,” said sophomore Margaret Johnston.
For many of the women, the hardest part about having children was the unexpected loss of control they experienced.
“I kind of wanted to have the little steps and the checkmarks and mark things off the list, and having to give that up was hard,” said Destafani, mother-of-one and Hillsdale senior.
During her third pregnancy, accountant Taylor was working from home when her water broke.
“The baby was born on the bathroom floor after 40 minutes of labor,” Taylor said. “That was the unexpected hardship. I didn’t get to choose, it just happened.”
Lindley, who is pregnant with her ninth baby, agreed. She emphasized that there are many good ways to give birth.
“I feel like part of having such a wide variety of experiences with birth has been God showing me there are all different ways that we can do this,” Lindley said.
Despite the trials they faced while giving birth, the women agreed that having children comes with incredible moments of joy.
Mother-of-two Gregg ’12 described the surprise she felt when she met her daughter for the first time.
“I was really shocked when she was born,” Gregg said. “I formed no emotional bond during the pregnancy at all, and then to have this person come out was one of the most astonishing, sacred moments of my life.”
The women tied the experience of childbirth to sacrifice, specifically in understanding the labor process as a sacrifice in union with Christ’s sacrifice.
Gregg said that despite modern technology and innovations in the field of medicine, birthing procedures have seen no real medical improvements for centuries.
“I hope it stays that way,” Gregg said. “Anywhere there’s something good, there’s always someone who is suffering for it, Christ being the central example.”
The women reminded their audience that while fear is a natural emotion, it shouldn’t get in the way of giving birth.
“Don’t be overwhelmed,” Spiteri said. “It’s a really glorious suffering, and a really beautiful thing, giving birth and being a mother. So many women have done it before us; we wouldn’t be here without that.”
