In East Indian culture, baya is the name for both a kettle drum shaped like a pregnant belly and for a pollinating weaver bird whose hanging nest also resembles a pregnant belly.
In Tagalog, bayá(s) refers to fermented juice or wine, a perfect reminder of the wisdom our bodies have to transition.
And in Turkish, baya is a common misspelling of a word that can mean either ‘very’ or ‘banal’. Yes! Birth is a duality. It’s both wondrous and ordinary.
Finally, baya is an Arabic name that can be given to celebrate positive attributes, like a person’s individual radiance.
May you freely be and birth as you are!
Photo by Ari Krishnan
Why B.A.Y.A
So many reasons!
One day, driving in the car, years after I had begun supporting women, I was thinking about how expectations from others and ourselves can influence how we feel and how we birth.
While it’s true that we’re all works in progress, it’s also true that we’re enough. Then it came to me: birth as you are, without shame or inhibition.
The acronym of "birth as you are" spells b.a.y.a., which has beautiful meanings the world over.
In the West African Hausa language, baya means ‘background’ or ‘behind’, great descriptors for doula support.
In Spanish, baya is slang for a small juicy fruit, like a ripening baby.
While it’s true that we’re all works in progress, it’s also true that we’re enough. Then it came to me: birth as you are, without shame or inhibition.
Wise Woman Birth Tradition
The doula support I offer comes from the wise woman birth tradition, which is rooted in a deep understanding of intersecting ancestral, biological, and cultural truths:
-- the inner knowing women have of their own bodies and babies,
-- the hormonal and physiological process of birth itself,
-- the history of traditional midwifery and its wisdom of experience,
-- the entrance of obstetrics and its reliance on technology, and
-- the cultural fear that arose when birth moved from home to hospital.
This tradition recognizes that a mother sits at the center of these whirling intersections, grounded by her individual knowledge and beliefs. All her support people and options, from the most interventional to the most undisturbed, are available for her to access, swirling inward toward her as choice and outward from her as decision. She is the eye of a spiral storm of power, the oasis in a spiral shell of creation – the inspiration for the Birth As You Are logo!
Photo by Rachel Minery
I learned in this tradition from two of my mentors, Indie Birth midwives and founders, Maryn Green and Margo Blackstone. With over thirty years of experience between them, they approach each mother as the center of her pregnancy and birth, a whole person who deserves love and nurturing as she looks within herself for her strength, which includes choosing what she wants for herself and from her support team.
Such a care tradition informs the mother of all she has before her, from the most technological to the most holistic, which means there is no right way, only the way the mother will choose. It trusts that with informed, intuitive reflection and choice at each juncture, she will know what is right for her and her baby.
In turn, the mother learns to trust herself and take responsibility for her pregnancy and birth, including true nourishment of her body and mind, which is the most important care she will receive between provider appointments. As Anne Frye, the midwife’s midwife, instructs about the importance of this nourishment, “prenatal care is something a woman does for herself during pregnancy". Frye's is a powerful sentiment reminding us that the most important answers in pregnancy and birth are usually ones within us, though of course we do not have to do any of it alone. Sourcing support and expertise can be comforting, helpful, and sometimes necessary.
Believing that a woman can take responsibility for herself and her pregnancy recognizes that a woman's intuition is powerful while not disconnected from her research or from the knowledge of the care team she chooses. The combination of trusting one's self and one's ability to apply knowledge allows women to know when any one test, option, or recommendation is right or not for them. This provides a deeply personally buffer between individual experience and the routine application of standard obstetric protocol.
While obstetric care is so important to have when wanted and life-saving when needed, widely applying its protocol en masse is only sometimes helpful, frequently unnecessary, and often results in negative effects on birth, nursing, or bonding. We can see this in the conclusions found in the Listening to Mothers surveys conducted by national perinatal organizations in the early to mid 2000s. In reference to mothers with hospital-based pregnancy and labor care, "Many survey results suggest that large segments of this population are experiencing clearly inappropriate care that does not reflect the best current evidence and standards, as well as experiencing other undesirable circumstances and adverse outcomes [that] likely impact millions of mothers or babies annually in the U.S." (Declercq, Sakala, Corry, Applebaum, Herrlich, 2013).
Findings like these allow us to seek a larger solution not by vilifying providers but by showing us that the perinatal system is not working as well as women deserve. Truly viable answers must move beyond either/or choices between home/hospital and midwife/OB. Sustainable change must call for radically individualized care within all systems and care networks that unite unde one over-arching paradigm: the mother leads.
When it comes to following the mother, the wise woman tradition has something to offer. From a comparative viewpoint, if the technology-based model of obstetric care views the woman’s body as a malfunctioning machine that must be saved in order to produce a baby (read Davis-Floyd's seminal book Birth as An American Right of Passage), then the wise woman model alternatively understands that the woman’s body is whole, to be nurtured and trusted as it works in symbiosis with its baby.
On this point of trust, midwife Maryn Green shares that the pregnant person in the wise woman tradition feels free to say, “I seek support so that I can access what I know.” Her care provider feels confident responding, "I will be here for whatever you decide you need. Trust yourself.”
The effectiveness of such give and take has been recorded by the renowned birth anthropologist, Robbie Davis-Floyd. In her talk "Intuition as Authoritative Knowledge", she shares that the global birth support traditions with the highest satisfaction rates and measurably best outcomes feature providers whose own confidence comes mainly from trusting women and women trusting back in a synergy of their intuitions.
At its core, then, the wise woman model is about connection. It supports a woman to connect to her truth, believes in her choice to follow that truth, and is present for her throughout that journey. This can be easy to outline as theory but tricky to practice within a culture that places more value in preemptive risk management than it does on individualized care co-created by a woman and her provider as they observe how the woman and her baby are feeling and doing in real time.
Because dichotomies can be reductive, Robbie moves beyond birth support paradigm division to distill something that decades of research showed her again and again, regardless of where or how a woman birthed:
“A woman’s satisfaction with her birth outcomes is in direct relation to how much her provider’s birth care philosophy aligns with her own birth views and goals.” This may be one of the most important concepts to consider for anyone deciding who they want their birth providers to be.
In kind, the wise woman tradition holds that birth support of all levels is best offered by presenting options without dictating direction. This allows space to discover where a mother's decisions will lead and how her support can best meet her there. This is the truest kind of informed consent.
If the wise woman birth tradition were a simple list, this would be it:
-- pregnancy and birth are normal, not pathological;
-- unconditional love and deep emotional and physical nourishment are the core of care;
-- all levels of intervention, holistic to technological, are skilled and available whenever needed;
-- support is present, engaged, and creates no disturbance unless wanted or needed;
-- each pregnant person is totally unique;
-- power and responsibility of choice reside in the pregnant person;
-- birth of every kind is empowerment.
May you remember the wisdom inside yourself.