Mayim Bialik Is A Real-Life Rebel – She Thinks Homebirth Is Normal!
Mayim Bialik of Big Bang Theory fame has made headlines recently for her vocal support of breastfeeding, even (gasp) in public. What a radical she is! Perhaps even more shocking is her heartfelt belief that babies can be safely born AT HOME!
That Mayim Bialek is one smart lady. With her strong background in neuroscience, Mayim is a strong supporter of all facets of attachment parenting, a multi-faceted concept coined by Dr. Sears which includes:
- Bonding
- Breastfeeding
- Co-sleeping/Bedsharing
- and Baby-wearing (See Mayim Bialik’s book Beyond the Sling.)
Bialik herself has even had a homebirth, “almost unassisted,” she says, and she fully supports midwives and homebirth. While much of the world approaches labor clamoring for their epidural or planned C-section, Mayim Bialik is a staunch, outspoken supporter of NORMAL. She maintains, “One intervention often snowballs into another, and this is part of what has led to the astounding rate of unnecessary C-sections in this country.”
That rate is an appalling 33 percent, according to the CDC, and many of those cesareans are unnecessary. They increase the risk of infection and even death for the mother, as well as raising the risk of the newborn spending time in the NICU or other complications. What is more, all these c-sections, as well as inductions with drugs such as Pitocin and Cytotec, are significant factors in placing the United States rock bottom of the stats for maternal and infant mortality in the developed world.
Instead of fearing labor and childbirth, Mayim Bialik has a confident faith in a woman’s ability to birth the baby in the very place where it all began, in her own home, in her own space. Everything she writes of birth declares her defiance of “BirthFright,” a term coined by Carla Hartley, the founder of the Trust Birth Initiative and Ancient Art Midwifery Institute. Increasingly, mothers are reclaiming the fact that childbirth is a normal part of human biology and is designed to work. (Probably in real life, Mayim Bialik and Carla Hartley would be great friends!)
Mayim has blogged and spoken several times in favor of homebirth, combating common myths that seem to always accompany the subject. Bialik speaks of the madness of the fear-mongering that often surrounds the whole process:
If we stop viewing birth as an emergency waiting to happen — it’s NOT — then we can stop imposing anxiety on women about birth. I hear many stories about women and babies dying in childbirth that are designed to make me doubt the power of the human body. I grieve for every woman and every child who has died in childbirth, but I honestly resent being encouraged to make decisions based on these stories. It’s irrational, it’s hysteria-inducing, and it’s insulting to any woman’s intuition and intelligence.
Childbirth educators, doulas, and midwives the world over shout these same things from the rooftops, but they don’t have the celebrity status and platform that Bialik has earned. Mayim Bialik is well-known for her starring role in the 90s sitcom Blossom, and her current role of Amy Farrah Fowler in the popular comedy The Big Bang Theory.
It is hoped that the words that Mayim so clearly articulates can be heard clearly by a generation of young women who have grown up with images of catastrophically painful birth and babies in cribs drinking formula from a bottle. It is a radical perspective on birth and babies that Mayim Bialik adheres to, but one that is as ancient as humanity itself.
