Free Birth, Wild Birth, Home Birth: Untangling the Tangle

A birth keeper’s guide to free birth, wild birth, home birth and unassisted birth.

I’m a birth keeper, which is a tidy way of saying I’ve spent years trying to understand a vocabulary that seems to multiply every time I blink. Free birth, wild birth, home birth, unassisted birth. Half the time I feel as if I need a glossary just to have a conversation about it. Even the simple term ‘midwife’ could mean an obstetric nurse or a wild-birth wisdom-keeper. Birth keeper as a title also means many things. I know doulas, midwives and even doctors who use the term, although the only thing we all agree on is that birth is sacred.

And even I, birth keeper, retired midwife and a doula trainer, struggle to understand the terms assigned to birth choices. It is a minefield. Let’s focus on birth outside of the medical system for a moment. Think of the birth world as a forest with many winding paths through it. One is called free birth. One is wild birth. One is the ancient pathway of home birth. One is unassisted birth. They overlap, diverge and weave around each other in the strangest ways.

In the world of birth, a single label can ripple through a room as it subtly modifies the context of the conversation. These labels carry emotional charge. We get very excited about them, and it is not because anyone loves vocabulary. It is because each term quietly carries a power claim. People swear they know exactly which path leads to paradise and which to ruin. They rarely agree. Who decides what is safe. Who decides what is foolish. Who decides who is allowed to choose. The words are just the surface. Beneath them is the old question of who gets the final say over a woman’s body and a baby’s arrival.

What I call free birth, a woman’s choice to birth entirely alone and fully in her power, others term madness. To some, a free birth is simply a home birth. To those in the medical system, a home birth is madness. To those choosing a home birth or a wild birth, which I think means no medical checkups during pregnancy and no interventions during labour, the world of institutional childbirth is madness. Madness. It turns out that “madness” is usually what we call something we do not understand.

Unassisted birth is a clearer term. Maybe you have a doula, midwife or doctor present or nearby, maybe not, maybe you’re on your own, but you are in your own sovereignty and if there is anyone present, they are hands off, mouths shut, witnesses to the sacred event of childbirth as an initiation for you and your baby. In unassisted births, the first hands to touch the baby are your own, warm from your body, instinct guiding you long before thought catches up. Birth becomes a portal for soul expansion, a deep and powerful dance that you and your baby undertake on myriad levels of reality.

I think of the woman who began her labour terrified by the intensity of early contractions, then dropped into pure surrender and birthed her first child in two magnificent hours. She did not need labels in that moment, yet the vocabulary helped her choose the path that enabled such surrender.

There are men-free births, where birth is seen as woman’s domain, and these may be thick with centuries of memory and laughter. And there are births where the partner is the most important support person in the room, where the partner’s hand never leaves the small of your back, warm and steady through every surge, as if the whole room is breathing through that single point of contact. These births fill the room with love and care, a deep witnessing that becomes the foundation for a lifetime of togetherness.

Here is what is clear and beyond definition though. We have a council of people surrounding us, offering advice, suggestions and judgments about our birth choices. Aunties, algorithms, obstetricians, Instagram, the neighbour’s cousin who once had a breech birth.

We have our own judgments, reservations and fears about the choices we are making, whether they are fears about what people will think if we wild birth, or maybe they stem from fear of the medical establishment. However, birth has been misunderstood for centuries, yet it keeps happening in perfect sanity.

One of the members of the council that sits as an often-silent witness to it all is our own soul self or inner compass. It knows what is right for each of us individually.

The retired midwife in me raises an eyebrow every time someone invents a new term. The soul-guide in me just laughs gently and reminds me that most of birth takes place in realms where language cannot follow. They sit side by side in me. One takes notes. The other listens for the soul of the baby. Together they make sense of this wild vocabulary.

As the person making your own birth choices for your baby and yourself, you can turn to your soul-guide for its non-judgmental support, feel into its loving presence and move in the direction that this heartfelt, sure wisdom leads you. You are the person who knows what is right for you, not in the loud voice of the activist, but in the quiet dreams, from the inner realms and from that part of you that quite simply knows, without definition. Birth has its own intelligence. It whispers to you long before anyone else has an opinion. Trust the whisper. It belongs to you.

About the Author

Robyn Sheldon is a midwife, integration therapist and doula trainer whose work supports people to come into deeper alignment with themselves and the souls of their babies. She offers compassionate space for those navigating fertility challenges, loss, adoption and the longing to understand their soul purpose, as well as those preparing for birth. Author of the Mama Bamba Way, she teaches that the way we welcome new life shapes trust and belonging. Her background weaves fine art, midwifery, integration therapy, teaching and doula training, strengthened by decades of meditation and counselling. Robyn offers compassionate care training, doula training, soul connection work and individual antenatal preparation that helps parents create grounded, meaningful and sacred beginnings.

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