Men are vulnerable at birth but powerful in numbers

I got this comment on the trailer on Youtube:

Where does this overwhelming respect for authority come from, that it allows hospital staff to abuse mom & baby?
I sure don't have it.
For five bucks I'll attend your birth and if an attendant ignores a "No" or a direct request, I'll break their freaking face.

You might make a lot of money if you could be in so many places at once. Since that's not possible I hope the film shows the medical based caregivers -- doctors, nurses, and midwives -- how they can support and protect the father as well.

How is it that we have "this overwhelming respect for authority?" Well, this is going to be a big part of Parts 2, 3, and 4. I would not use the word "respect" to describe how men and women acquiesce the control of their body, mind, and soul to strangers who sadly do not remember that this other human being before them, in their care, is a also sacred being, a soul in this body, a whole human being.

I think it is fear; a physiological response to the generational impact of giving it over and being dominated. As I interviewed men this year, as the filming and editing evolved, I came to see the true nature and role of the male is not to be the big, powerful protector against invaders and predators during his baby's birth. It's like asking him to protect his family from a home invader who just happened to break in as he and his partner have just made love. Right in the middle of that glow, in that rush of love hormones, taking a drag on his cigarette, a man disrupted is a man who can be easily toppled. He is the least likely to be able to protect anything but his own jewels. (And, yeah, part 4 WILL get into how circumcision of the male child who has most likely been induced, drugged, roughly handled, separated from his mother and father, isolated, mishandled by numerous women doing hospital routines, and THEN has the end of his penis cut off leads to a man who is standing there frozen, basically unable to protect himself, let alone his partner and baby.)

A man is physiologically, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually vulnerable at the moment of his baby's birth. He is witnessing his baby, the result of his love and sperm, emerge, and he is taking in how amazing and powerful his partner is -- all of this a product, and a consequence of his making this baby. Darn right, in the hospital setting, clearly demonstrated to be one invasion after another, he needs another man there who can protect him so that he can experience the climax of his conception of his baby. Birth. His creation emerging. To have his moment of awe -- see, touch, smell and take in his creation, to gather his partner and baby into the strength and power of his loving, protective heart and arms, that is what he needs.

Imagine, if we lived in a world where we didn't have our homes as fortresses with security systems, walls, fences, gates, and laws to protect our ownership and privacy. And, imagine the only way to ensure that you could have uninterrupted, quality, private lovemaking, and feel vulnerable enough to have an orgasm, and to collapse in the heights of the ecstasy of the moments after was to have your buddy guard the perimeter of your space from predators. Darn right, you'd need your buddy (or two or three) there, willing to "break their freaking face" if an intruder insisted on disrupting or endangering you and your loved one. Men need that in the hospital. And, thank you for offering it.

One thing I hope to accomplish with this film is shifting our current acceptance and perception about it being OK, and the responsibility of a man and woman and a need to prepare to be so fierce in birthing their baby in the hospital. That's a huge social imprint that creates a lot of our issues. I am concerned about this dynamic of having to be educated, armed, and prepared to fight for your rights in the hospital; to fight for what is physiologically natural, and seemingly simple, logical, respectful, kind, and science-based care. What is up with that anyway, that in 2009, in such a "civilized" time and nation, a woman has to go to the hospital prepared to fight for her life against intrusions, drugs, invasions of privacy, and to keep her body and soul intact? I tire of hearing, even from the medical caregivers I've interviewed who DO honor the mother-baby-father trinity, that THE CONSUMERS have to create the change.

Part of me screams, NO! #*#&%@ It is the medical establishment, the people doing it, who must stop what they do that harms a man and his family. Right now. NOW! The science is there, on the side of natural birth and homebirth, and kindness and compassion, but they are allowed to do whatever they wish -- until a movement of consumers hurts their assets enough to make them stop. These caregivers I interviewed have all gone through their own evolution to become the caregivers they are. They need support too. They know that the consumers are the only way that changes happen in their profession. They know too well that those who try from the inside are ostracized and persecuted. I think the shift can happen ... but it will take an uprising of men.

Men have been telling me they need support of other men ... and it is one of the goals of a group I am supporting to grow, Fathers For Better Birth.com, website coming. Contact Kris Amick at amickkris@gmail.com. And, it is why part of my Baby Keeper training, on the back burner simmering away while I finish this film, includes training midwives, doulas, nurses, and doctors how to support men to support men in birth.