Underwater maternity – Atzin

Underwater maternity – Atzin came across our Underwater maternity images few weeks ago during a presentation we hold in Cancun. She called us few days later and said she had fallen in love with our images, especially those ones taken in the cenote to Lizeth. We just waited for her husband to be back to Cancun during a week-end and moved to a beautiful cenote just off Playa del Carmen. Yesterday, upon receiving all the photos, Atzin burst into tears, such deep was her emotion in admiring herself flying underwater. Of course, we were quite honored of her moving reaction.  Here are some images of the day.

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Underwater maternity

[My mother’s] feeling is, we were made to do this work, and it’s not easy, and it’s inherently painful…. Pain and pleasure are a continuum, and without the pain, there would not be the pleasure. We wouldn’t have a place to slide around, and that this is just an intense experience of pain. It’s also an intense experience of pleasure, and joy and hope…. I would say that the pain is part of the glory, or the tremendous mystery of life. And that if anything, it’s kind of a privilege to stand so close to an incredible miracle. And that there’s pain involved because it’s such a tremendous event… it’s like living in a different dimension briefly. And that it’s a painful process, because it’s like two worlds colliding. ~Simone Taylor, on childbirth, quoted in Blessed Events: Religion and Home Birth in America by Pamela E. Klassen, 2001

Women today not only possess genetic memory of birth from a thousand generations of women, but they are also assailed from every direction by information and misinformation about birth.  ~Valerie El Halta

Underwater maternity
$13 to $20 billion a year could be saved in health care costs by demedicalizing childbirth, developing midwifery, and encouraging breastfeeding.  ~Frank A. Oski

Underwater maternity
The experience profoundly changed my perspective.  In the hospital, I hadn’t perceived the anxiety and foreboding that permeated birth until I experienced the impact of its absence among the midwives.  The peace, wonder, and intimacy were infinitely greater.  What a compelling difference!  ~Heidi Rinehart

People are giving birth underwater now.  They say it’s less traumatic for the baby because it’s in water. But certainly more traumatic for the other people in the pool.  ~Elayne Boosler

Underwater maternity
Childbirth was probably easier for most women in early cultures, especially in hunter-gatherer societies, where everyone was accustomed to physical labor and supple and fit from daily activity.  ~Suzanne Arms

Underwater maternity

According to our Lamaze instructor that winter, my body was supposed to “self-anesthetize” during labor and delivery, allowing me to remain wholly alert for the miracle of birth.  She assured our class of hefty, plural-bodied women that our cervix muscles would become “naturally numb” as they swelled and stretched, and deep breathing would turn the final explosions of pain into “manageable discomfort.”  This description turned out to be as accurate as, say, a steward advising passengers aboard the Titanic to prepare for a brisk but bracing swim.  If my self-anesthesia took at all, it packed the power of two baby aspirin.  ~Mary Kay Blakely, American Mom: Motherhood, Politics, and Humble Pie, 1995

Underwater maternity