If you can get through your fears, you can be truly free, whether it's during birth or just life in general. There is a reward for overcoming your anxieties. There is so much fear in this culture about childbirth that it dominates women's lives and affects their pregnancies, births and parenting in general. For me, it was liberating on many levels to give birth this way-unassisted.

To see that my body really can be trusted not to betray me opened the door to other possibilities and experiences in my life that I don't think I would have had the courage to take on if I hadn't overcome my fear of childbirth.

When I was probably about six years old, I asked my mother how babies came into the world, and she explained that when you give birth, they cut you-she told me about the episiotomy. I don't think my mother was trying to frighten me, but I basically decided right then that I was never going to have children.

In television and movies, birth is always presented as this dangerous, painful, medical event, and it's only after the baby is born that people are smiling. No one presents the act of giving birth itself as pleasurable, spiritual or empowering.

All of my children have been born unassisted, and I would say it has been a wonderful challenge. Particularly when my third child was born, I really felt like I touched the eternal. My first image of her face was when she was still inside the water bag. The water bag broke and she slid into my hands, and it was this feeling of pure connection with another human being. It was pure bliss.

I was on one knee and one foot and I looked down and saw her face coming out. Technically it's not the way babies are supposed to be born; they're supposed to be born facing the woman's back, according to doctors. I don't think birth is any more of a huge mystery than any other bodily function. When you're having sex, no one tells you what position you should get in; you just know what feels right to you in that particular situation. In all my births, I gave birth in different positions.

Because I grew up with a lot of fear about childbirth, I never even planned on having children, let alone doing it unassisted. Then I met my husband, David. He had been studying the evolution of the self-consciousness, and how many of our psychological problems can be traced back to a traumatic birth. He was also reading a book called Childbirth Without Fear by Grantly Dick-Read [2].

That book was written in the 1940s and it talked about how birth should give women a feeling of exaltation. It's not meant to be this horribly traumatic, painful experience. No other natural bodily function is painful and dangerous, so birth should not be the exception.

There's a belief in our culture that throughout history, babies have routinely died in childbirth. People don't recognize that as a belief; they recognize it as a truth, and so they fear childbirth. Dick-Read found that the majority of problems in birth are caused by fear.

When you're afraid, you trigger the fight/flight response, which is meant to save your life when you're in a dangerous situation. If you don't want to be giving birth, you basically shut down labor. When a woman is afraid in labor, which most women are, messages are sent to the body telling it that it's in a dangerous situation. Blood and oxygen flow away from the uterus and into the arms and legs so you can fight the perceived danger or run away from it.

So, the uterus of a frightened woman in labor is literally white and it doesn't have the fuel it needs to function properly. That leads to tremendous pain and problems, and babies get stuck.

If you really do the research, you see that throughout history, healthy women have been successfully giving birth unassisted. The problems have come when women lived in poor countries, when they're starving to death, when they have dirty water or poor housing.

Wealthy women may have had problems during birth because they were taught it was shameful to appear in public pregnant. They would be stuck in their homes, not getting exercise or fresh air. Plus, they would be corseted for most of their lives, and their pelvises were literally deformed. So, there are reasons why some women had problems. It's not because the process of birth has been poorly designed.

It the late 1970s, David and I began to understand just how powerful fear was. To us, it made sense that there is a consciousness that knows how to grow an egg and a sperm into a human being, so it only makes sense that the consciousness would know how to complete the process, provided we don't interfere.

The more we looked into it, the more we saw how much of a factor outside intervention is. When you go to a hospital and someone is continually checking you, measuring you, testing you, it interferes with you psychologically, just as it would interfere with you physically and psychologically if people were watching you and instructing you when you have sex.

Can you imagine enjoying sex if someone stood there and said, "We're going to watch you and then we're going to check you to see how close to orgasm you are. If you don't have an orgasm in the next few minutes, then we're going to cut you open."

The definition of normal childbirth has gotten smaller and smaller and the definition of high risk birth has gotten bigger and bigger. The medical approach to birth is, everyone has to be the same size, everyone has to be 10 centimeters dilated, everything is timed, staged, numbered-first trimester, second trimester, third trimester-it doesn't allow for the fact that women's bodies are different sizes and shapes.

If a woman doesn't conform, they will come at her with their drugs, knives and machinery. In childbirth, there are all sorts of variations. I had one baby born feet first. In the hospital, where any variation is defined as a complication, I would have been given a C-section.

For women who want midwives, that's fine. I felt like anyone I brought in, I would have to educate. Even a very hands-off midwife is still there, and she's still watching you. Try to imagine taking someone in with you while you try to go to the bathroom. Any natural bodily function is changed when it's observed. Midwives bring their own fears and beliefs about birth.

Also, unfortunately, in many places, midwives are regulated and have a list of things that they have to adhere to. For example, they may be told they can't catch a baby if the woman has had a previous C-section. They also have to adhere to certain laws.

In Colorado, a placenta is supposed to be out within an hour of the birth. I know many women who have had unassisted birth, and the placenta has come out seven, eight hours later, or maybe even the next day. But, in one case in Colorado, because it's supposed to be out in an hour, the midwife began pulling on the cord, the woman ended up hemorrhaging and being transferred to the hospital.

David hasn't even been with me for all our children's births. The first time, he caught the baby. With the other ones, I just happened to be in the room by myself; I didn't specifically tell him to leave. With our last child, he was down the hall and I hadn't told him that I was in labor. I was just on my way to the bath and sat down on the toilet, looked between my legs and there was the water bag, which broke and she just slid into my hands.

That one happened very quickly. I was so relaxed that nothing was keeping her from coming out. David came down the hall and just found me sitting there with this newborn.

David and I are just both fascinated by the power of the mind and how the mind affects the body. My husband actually lactated once. We had read in a book that men were capable of lactating, so as an experiment, he said, "I believe I'm producing milk." About a week later, he noticed his shirt was wet, one breast was slightly enlarged and there was milk dripping out. We're not male breastfeeding advocates, per se. For us it was simply another example that showed how responsive our bodies are to our thoughts, and we don't have to be afraid of our bodies.

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It's not illegal to catch your own baby, although there are women who have been told so by their local health departments, and there may be doctors who want to make it illegal. Doctors may speak out against it, but the truth is that women and babies have a higher likelihood of dying during a C-section than during a vaginal birth. Doctors really don't have the statistics to back up their claim that freebirthing is dangerous.

The Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada (SOGC) were having a conference recently and they decided they were going to discuss the growing trend of unassisted birth and make a statement against it. Basically what that did is educate a lot of people that freebirthing is even a phenomenon. If more women realize it's a viable option, it follows that it will continue to grow.

I think doctors are threatened by unassisted birth for financial reasons. In America, the number one or number two reason for hospital admission each year is childbirth. There's a film coming out called Pregnant in America [3], and in a trailer for the film, author Joseph Chilton Pearce says that 66 per cent of all hospital revenue comes from childbirth. When women talk about doing it themselves, it's certainly a threat to the present medical system. Other doctors just truly believe that childbirth is inherently dangerous, and so they see themselves as saving women from their own bodies.

Sooner or later, there will be an unassisted birth where the mother or baby or both will die, and then anti-freebirthers will use that as an example. There's no form of childbirth that will ensure success 100 per cent of the time, but our success rates really are good, and that may be why the movement is gaining popularity. Women are seeing that if they don't interfere physically or psychologically, there is an intelligence there that can be trusted.

The women who are trying unassisted births aren't all crunchy granola types. A lot of them are into natural lifestyles, but it's really just average women who have done their research. Uneducated women are actually more likely to defer to the so-called experts. The more intelligent a woman is, the more likely she is to trust her own instincts and believe in her own abilities.

In my case, my father was a physician, my mother did medical research and my sister was a labor and delivery nurse, so I had a fairly medical upbringing. It never really felt right to me. I thought, something feels wrong here.

I've taken a pretty psychological approach. You don't have to physically understand everything that is happening when you're giving birth. What you have to do is just be relaxed, and so in my book, I just tried to logically dispel fears. I talk about the power of the mind and tell women that it's really more a matter of not doing than doing. When women overcome their fears, they get out of their own way.

I'm always asked the question, "Who shouldn't have an unassisted birth?" I feel like it's not my place to answer that. There are women who have bled throughout their labors and done fine, there are women who have had a textbook pregnancy and then something goes wrong in a hospital birth. I'm very reluctant to give advice. Each woman has to decide for herself.

The goal to me is to have a healthy and happy pregnancy and birth. Based on the research I have done, I believe unassisted childbirth was the safest and best choice for me.

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Read another viewpoint on freebirth: Hazel Main's I Participated In A Freebirth [4]