Birth Agni
This Podcast explores how indigenously Birth has always unfolded, among women - our tribe, where children could see how breastfeeding was done and how birth happened. This an attempt to fetch the stories of the past as well as bring out the new India’s Birth culture to expose the defining features in both. This shall join the dots to where the increasing problems of postpartum anxiety, rising rate of surgical births and poor breastfeeding outcomes are coming from.
Birth Agni - Agni meaning Fire, the Fire that brings us alive, transforms us and has the ability to burn. Birth is designed to affect a woman’s integrity. It is the fire of awakening that makes her life experience wholesome. Deep down her body knows what Birth is supposed to feel - a euphoria of bringing a new life on Earth. The cocktail of hormones are designed to give her a high.
However, birth today has quickly swayed away from a phase of joy to the one marked by Fear, the constant questioning of a woman’s capacity to Birth naturally and the ugly calculation of the odds of a healthy baby at the expense of the mother’s health. We forget that their health is interlinked and flourish as a dyad. In India, the urban rate of Cesarean Sections on an average until 2020 is a whopping 40% which is concerning.
Birth is linked to Patriarchy, Healthcare Politics and Women’s Rights. Respect in Birth is long due to women and it affects the core of who they are.
Join me Divya Kapoor, a Certified Birth and Lactation Counselor and aspiring Traditional Birth Attendant in the quest to shine light on what we can do as parents and a community to change the narrative.
Birth Agni
#102 - Part I Sanjana's Natural Birth at a Birth Center | Travelling for Birth- Mumbai to Kerala | Meeting the Divine
Every woman sheds a part of herself as she goes through the rites of passage - Menarche, Birth, and Menopause - the life-altering experiences that hold huge significance. We all arrive in pregnancy with something we have learned from our life experiences, which helps us visualize our birth in a certain way. Some of us desire it to be a breeze, some of us desire it to be painless, some of us desire it to be with friends and family, some of us want to avoid surgery at all costs even if we do not know what birth can look like, some of us consider it our identity linked to birthing naturally as women.
Sanjana's journey has been the same, very much like many of us. She is self-aware, reflective, and growth-oriented: inward in her journey of pregnancy and birth. Her transitioning definitions about herself contributed to the decision of prioritizing her ideas about birth over the little juggles of life.
Listen to the journey of transformation for a woman through pregnancy and birth as we re-discuss them as the rightful dimensions of growth a woman is gifted with, which she has all the right to experience guided by herself rather than any authority or outward force.
About Guest: Sanjana is a Political Scientist by profession focused on urban-rural linkages, urban studies, and inequalities in India. She is the co-founder of the Beejvan Biodiversity and Collaborative Research Foundation. A winner of the Erasmus scholarship, the German Chancellors’ Fellowship, and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Her project, Beejvan, won the Lush Spring Prize 2023 in the UK.
Sanjana is also a home-birthing mother of two daughters and very passionate about immunology, and enjoys learning about various indigenous healing modalities. Her quest for truth, led by her intuition, beyond what science and religion have attempted to understand and preach, is what led her to birth her daughters and raise them on her own terms. The journey of healing is non-linear and ongoing, and she trusts it is a beautiful one, even on the worst days.
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