August link round-up: home birth, cesarean birth, body image after birth and more…

I love putting together these monthly link round-ups because I get to revisit my favorite articles and websites from the previous month. In August we celebrated World Breastfeeding Week (Aug 1-7) and we observed “the Day of Hope and Healing, a national remembrance day for families who have experienced miscarriage, stillbirth, infant or child loss.” Then we read articles about home birth, cesarean birth, body image, raising Pagan children, rites of passage, and more:

• From Witch Mom – Teaching Children the Craft: Every Friday: “Every Friday, before “Friday Family Fun Night”, we do a Red Meal with Rowan. This is a rite where we make offerings to the gods of our Craft and the ancestors/Fae.”
• Getting real about home birth at the new Mutha Magazine: “But to anyone thinking about a homebirth I say put your thinker away and get closer, because this is some wonderful, terrible, crazy shit.”
• Paganism, motherhood, and body image from The Crunchy Pagan Mom – Danie Newcomb: “My body is not perfect, but it shows the course it took to bring two amazing little people into this world.”
• From Talk Birth – Brought to our knees… “Rigid plans work best if you’re building a skyscraper; with something as mysteriously human as giving birth, it’s best, both literally and figuratively, to keep your knees bent.” –Mark Sloan, MD (Birth Day)
• A post about cesarean births and money over at Witches & Pagans: “What is clear is that 1 out of 3 children are delivered by the scalpel in the United States today, and the reasons for altering our first rite of passage are not always based on medicine alone.”
• From a neighbor blog at Patheos – “My mission as a mother was to protect these seeds of the most sacred of the manifestations of divinity before they were born and until they could walk away on their own.”
• What Christina Beard-Moose, who’s teaching Cross-Cultural Rites at Cherry Hill Seminary this fall, has to say about the role of ritual in society: “But we are not very good at rites of passage in this country. Even though we have some good examples, like marriage, graduation, etc., and a few religious ceremonies like bar or bat mitzvah and confirmation – we really don’t do adolescent to adulthood in our society. I think that’s part of our societal angst, what everybody is looking for.”
• And finally a great short (8 min) video presentation on supporting birthing women spiritually.

Here at Pagan Families we had posts about increased access to emergency contraception, birth as a spiritual experience, the idea of a birther as a warrior, a rite of passage for a 5 year-old, problems with abstinence-only sex ed, and three posts in the site-wide Patheos discussion of Passing On The Faith.

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