Birth as an American Rite of Passage by Robbie Davis-Floyd

<div>Ok, it’s only one of a huge stack of books next to
my bed

So I’m reading Birth
as an American Rite of Passage
by Robbie Davis-Floyd and staying up
too late every night engrossed in it. I started out doing Julia Cameron’s Artist’s
Way
a few months ago and my morning pages got me reflecting on
spirituality in my life and somehow I stumbled across Carol Lee Flinder’s At
the Root of this Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger and a Feminist
Thirst
and Sue Monk Kidder’s Dance
of the Dissident Daughter
and they got me questioning some of
the basic cultural assumptions about spirituality and God, but it wasn’t too
radical because as a Bahá’í I’d sort of already made peace with
the idea that God gives us a perfect religion and perfect teachers but a couple
of millenia will leave a religion subject to various kinds of corruption and
decline, and the subjugation of women could easily be one of those (notice I’m
not actually using the patriarchy word)… ok, but I’ve also been reading
obsessively about midwifery ever since my amazing experience giving birth to
Søren and a lot of what I’m reading has some critique of unnecessary
hospital procedures and this book, along with Women’s
Bodies, Women’s Wisdom
by Christine Northrup has me really wrestling
to figure out what basic cultural assumptions go into the practice of
conventional modern medicine, what sexism is there, what metaphors have blinded
us to truths that don’t fit into the package… I don’t know, but it’s rocking
my world a little because I’m used to trusting doctors, to saying “It’s science,
it’s objective, it’s right.” even though I have enough philosophy of science to
realize that scientific truth can change a lot faster than cultural or medical
practices. I’d still go to a cardiac surgeon if I had a heart attack, but I
feel this uncomfortable shifting of my own paradigms going on, feel like I have
a responsibility to examine the trust which I have always placed in medicine.
It’s hard to write about because I’m still reading this book and trying to
figure out what I think, and I’m grumpy that Søren is on antibiotics for
yet another ear infection and I’d love to know what standards I could use to
evaluate some of the alternatives to conventional, modern medicine…

1 Comment

  1. Holly Pruner
    Aug 30, 2010

    Tired of obtaining low numbers of useless traffic for your site? Well i want to tell you about a new underground tactic that produces myself $900 on a daily basis on 100% AUTOPILOT. I possibly could be here all day and going into detail but why dont you simply check their site out? There is really a great video that explains everything. So if your seriously interested in producing hassle-free money this is the site for you. Auto Traffic Avalanche

Submit a Comment