Transformational Birth and How to Heal Birth Trauma with Dr. Jen Schwartz, PhD
On today's episode, Dr. Jen Schwartz, and I explore the often unacknowledged transformational power of giving birth and how it's one of life's greatest rites of passage for women to become who they really are.
Referenced in the Show:
PDF of Dr. Schwartz's Dissertation, Childbirth As A Profound Experience, with color images of the artwork
Naomi Wolf, Author
Dr. Schwartz’s Bio:
Dr. Jen Schwartz, PhD, CFLE, has been working with families in various ways since 1993. As an educator, she has worked with children ages 4-18 in both traditional and non-traditional settings. As a Life Coach, Dr. Jen has coached individuals and couples in many areas of life, including relationship issues, running successful businesses, creating life goals, and getting out of debt. As a Certified Family Life Educator (CFLE), she has counseled individuals and families on topics ranging from looking for an ideal relationship to planning for children; from handling tantrums to empowering teenagers; and from preparing for marriage to powerfully ending relationships.
Dr. Jen has research and experience in attachment parenting, blended families, and alternative education. Her primary doctoral research involved looking at birth stories from both narrative and artistic expressions. She is especially interested in empowering women’s childbirth experiences and believes that having empowered, informed births is critical in empowering women as mothers.
Dr. Jen is the founder of Sego Lily School, Utah’s only school for self-directed learning in a working democracy. She has created workshops for adults including Trust-Based Parenting, From Scarcity to Abundance, and Healing with Sound. She is the mother of 3 amazing boys and one incredible non-binary young adult, and step-mom to another 4 awesome young people. She lives with her partner in West Jordan, Utah, along with a crazy but loving dog, a sweet cat, and 5 chickens.
When not parenting or working, Jen can be found in her garden, in the pages of a book, or somewhere at play with her art or a puzzle.
Full Transcript:
Sarah Marshall, ND: Welcome to HEAL. On today's episode, Dr. Jen Schwartz, and I explore the often unacknowledged transformational power of giving birth and how it's one of life's greatest rites of passage for women to become who they really are. I'm your host, Dr. Sarah Marshall. (music)
Sarah Marshall, ND: What I've been really investigating is like beyond the initial questions were like, What does it even mean to heal? What does it take to heal? What does healing look like? What, you know, like in inquiring into that, and now it's been getting layers deeper into like, what's the stuff we don't talk about. What's the unsaid in this world. And that's particularly where you came up as someone who's done some research into an area that we, I mean, until I met you, I'd never thought about it.
Jen Schwartz: Right?
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah.
Jen Schwartz: No, it really isn't. It's part of what I dealt with in my dissertation is, you know, the, the conversations we do have around birth are so limited. Like, you know, you got a couple of women together who have just had babies. They'll both tell you their miraculous stories of being saved by the doctors and you know, nothing about like themselves.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Right.
Jen Schwartz: It's just crazy.
Sarah Marshall, ND: So tell me about that. Like, what was the premise of your dissertation? How did that come about?
Jen Schwartz: Well, it came about, I mean, it's the longer story. That you know, for the, for the podcast wouldn't really be important. But, when I started my doctoral work, I was in a workshop with a professor who's since passed away, but he was like just an amazing mentor and he had us write down.... so it was my very, very, very first intensive cause I did residential intensives and then everything else was online... and he had us write down everything that we could research. Like everything that's sort of in your wheelhouse, you know, it doesn't mean you're necessarily an expert, but like it's in your world and you're interested in it and stuff.
And, you know, with the school and everything, I had gone into my doctoral program thinking I was going to do research about that. And as I'm, so I'm making all these lists of like, I could do this and self-directed learning and, you know, autonomy and education and all these kinds of things. And I was just bored to tears and he was like, you know, you'll know it's the thing that you want to work on because it's the thing that just lights you up so much that even when you're disgusted by doing more work, you still want to do it. Right? And so I'm going through my list in this workshop and I'm just like, I don't know. I don't know. And one of the things I had on there was around birth and spirituality because I'd had such profound experiences myself and I just like burst into tears in this workshop. And fortunately I was in a doctoral program where that was really normal. Right? It's like, there's all these woowoo crazy people. And he was like, yeah, that's the thing you need to research.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Ahhh!
Jen Schwartz: So it was like, okay, there we go. It's not where I expected to be going with my life.
But yeah. So no, it just really came out of my own experiences. You know, as I said, sat with, Rebecca de Azevedo. Do you know her. No? She and I did the landmark forum together a million years ago. Anyway. When her older son was born, trying to think, I think Athan is about six months older than her son.
And so I brought her some baby clothes right after she had the baby and we were sitting there talking and I was like, well, how was it? And she starts telling me these really spiritual profound things about how it was. And it was the first time anyone had ever shared anything like that with me.
And it normalized my own experiences that I had had.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah.
Jen Schwartz: And I was like, Oh my God, I had that happen too. But no one else had ever said anything about it. So it just gave me, gave me room to talk about my own experiences and kind of unpack, you know, I'd had three births at that point, all of which were totally profound, but I'd never talked about it because that's not the kind of birth stories we tell in our culture, you know.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Awesome. Well, should we just dive in?
Yeah, let's do that. Cool. So Jen, thank you. You so much for being here on heal and bringing your heart, your expertise, and your own personal world to a pretty remarkable conversation. Like I said, like until you and I had talked about it. Of course, my thought is like, yeah, of course birthing is transformational, but yet just like you said, the common conversations are all kind of the same, that way that we talk about. And I have never given birth to a human being I've given birth to a business, a podcast also. (inaduble)
you know, and I was at my birth. My memory's a little shady, that one,
but, um, I'm just really excited to have you here and share about a whole new way of looking at this very common experience that all of us have even been through or witnessed in one way or another.
Jen Schwartz: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I'm always excited to talk about it. You know, it's a topic that, we don't talk about much in the world. And so when I get those opportunities, when people are like, tell me more about that. Or I'm dealing with clients who have trauma from their own birth experiences and we get to unpack that, it's always exciting for me, even, even when it's like totally traumatic experiences for them.
I'm like, yeah. Yeah. Tell me, tell me. Totally and well, and that's what
Sarah Marshall, ND: I think we're going to get into is like I say, transformational, but I'm also clear that my biggest transformations came from some pretty wickedly, intense, difficult, challenging circumstances. Transformational is like,
it's an outcome of for me, I'm not the same human being before and after, something alters in me. But that birthing canal, that process of going through it is, you know, can be all kinds of different things.
Jen Schwartz: Yeah.
Sarah Marshall, ND: So share with us, like what.
What, what does this mean to you? Like, like what exactly is the connection that you've kind of come up with around the spiritual connection between spirituality and birth.
Like what, what are you discovering?
Jen Schwartz: Yeah, so, you know, my, my doctoral work, what I wanted to look at was those conversations that people don't have about birth. That was really where I started was, you know, I know there are people out there who've had really profound experiences. And yet we don't talk about them, right? And if you look in media, portrayal of birth, like movies and film and TV, that sort of thing, I actually did it paper on that specific subject. And I put together the most hilarious compilation of little, you know, it's like the woman's water breaks in the street and they rush her to a hospital and then she has a baby.
That's (inaudible) right. and you know, depending on the kind of media, you know, mostly at the end of it, here's this, this actress with completely perfect makeup and completely perfect hair and a baby in her arms and, birth doesn't look like that. Right. And so I just started with that premise of like, I want to talk to people and see what actually happened in your body, in your mind, in your spirit, right? While and after you gave birth and specifically the during. It's really common. You know, you, you do see the media portrayal as well as the conversations of like: and then there was a baby in my arms, and everything was different. That happens and gets talked about a lot and it is like totally profound moment, right? I mean, especially if it's your first child there, you can't. It's one of those things that you cannot understand until you experience it directly, right? You go from growing this being, and then all of a sudden there's a human in your arms and there's a level of love and just profound transformation that happens there, that you have to experience to, to know what it is, right. But there's also so many things that happen during that process, you know, like you said, it's the birth canal process. Right. And, and I love the analogy you just drew too, because as I was working on my dissertation in particular, I use birth as a metaphor for my dissertation. (Inaudlbe) Myself. Yeah, totally. And I found myself in these different points. Right. There's this, this thing in childbirth. This part, we call transition. And it's the, you go from, you know, however much time it's usually hours of, you know, it's painful and it's long and tiring. And then there's this point.
Usually between about seven and 10 centimeters of dilation where things become so ridiculously intense that any control and you know, sense of who you are and everything just goes out the window. during that last little bit, and I found myself in a similar point with my dissertation, I was like, I hate this.
This is awful. I want to get away from it. Right. That's the point where you hear, birthing people say things like, I don't want to do it anymore. Right? And in my dissertation, it was the same thing. And I went, Oh, transition. Okay. Got it. Unfortunately, for my dissertation, it was about two months, in birth it's usually about an hour that you go through that. But yeah, so that's kind of, where, where I started was let's look at these conversations and see what are people actually saying. Yeah. And, what I did for, just for my research was I collected about 200 statements from mothers about, how would you describe your birth? Like just in a few sentences. And sometimes people would write a few paragraphs and that's fine. And that was kind of the first round of things I did. And then I did deeper interviews and I did an art therapy process with people as well, because it's also either like most transformative things in life, trying to put words to it, like good luck.
Good luck. You can't really capture it, right.
Sarah Marshall, ND: It was awful. It was amazing. It was incredible. It's the worst thing. I never want to do it again. I think I might do it again in a year and now I'm a different person, like we don't have language for that.
Jen Schwartz: Right. And what does that all mean? Right. And you're like, it's the most intense thing ever.
And then people are like, okay, what's the most intense thing I've ever experienced? Well, when I broke my leg, that was really intense. Maybe they mean it was intense like that. Right? You can't, you can't really describe it. So I went through an art therapy process as well, so that people had an opportunity to express it without language.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yep.
Jen Schwartz: And then we put language to the no language, which, you know, is it tricky little thing to do, but, but in each case, in each of the interviews I did, each mother saw something in their art that they expressed that was unique and wasn't expressed before, when they were telling me about the experience.
So it was really neat. But I found, you know, just starting with those first little narratives, when I said, give me a couple sentences, there were certain things that showed up over and over again, and they were things like, So one of them was spiritual experiences. Right? I had had people say things like, you know, my dead father was in the room.
Like there was a moment where my dead father's spirit was there in the room with me and I could see him in the corner or an angel showed up over me, or I felt the presence of God, right. Like all like really clear spiritual, and sometimes religious experiences that people had. There was also a whole category of people who described things like kind of taking back or taking on maybe for the first time for some, their own power and really, feeling empowered in a way that they never had before.
There was also actually having my little notes on that one. What else was there? Oh, relationships with other people. Right. So people saying that they're there all of a sudden, they felt connected to their partner in a completely different way. You know, and that may just a, been in the way their partner was supporting them during the birth, or it might've been more of a spiritual feeling of being connected with them.
When I gave birth to my 7-year-old, we had the weirdest experience happen. My, I was really. Things were pretty intense. It was a short, well, all of my labors were these long, drawn out things. And then Taly's birth was three and a half hours.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Wow.
Jen Schwartz: So really fast and intense. And I was just really feeling things.
And every time Joe would come too close to me, he would get nauseous and have to go get sick.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Wow.
Jen Schwartz: And, what we talked about afterwards was this experience we both had, which was that he'd come close to me, he'd take on some of my pain, he'd go get rid of it and then he'd come back.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Seems like a purging process.
Jen Schwartz: Right? Exactly. Yeah, exactly. (inaudible) and that was like an hour of that, you know, where we were just so connected on all these different levels that he would just come in, take some on, and go get rid of it and come back. Fortunately I had other support there with me while he was getting sick.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Good. Yeah. And then while we're here: how many times have you given birth?
Jen Schwartz: Four.
Sarah Marshall, ND: And how many kiddos do you have?
Jen Schwartz: Yep, I have. So it depends on how you count, right? Yeah. So I've got my four biological kids. I have four stepchildren and I have a child-in-law. So we usually say we have nine is the quick answer so the blended family, and then my oldest is married now and you know, that one is included in our accounts as well.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Absolutely, that's awesome. Yeah.
Jen Schwartz: Then also, you know, women had transformations with their own bodies, right. Experiencing their body as powerful in a way they never had. And by the way, I'm saying women, and obviously there are men, transgender men who give birth as well. Everyone in my dissertation was a cisgender woman.
So that's why I'm saying women instead of, and I've also used the term birthing people. Yeah. And then, and then relationships with their babies, right?
Having spiritual connections or physical connections with their babies while giving birth. Couple of women reported saying, or they said things like, I felt like we were a team. Like he and I are, she and I were working together to make this happen. And so those were just some of the kinds of experiences that people said they had and, and every one of those is a different kind of transformative experience. Right? One of the, another example is a woman that I interviewed who had twins. And she, when she first got pregnant, so they had three children and she jokes about talking her, her husband into the fourth. She was like, I just want one more. And he didn't want one more. And she finally talks him into number four and, And she's, you know, she's pregnant and she's, she's sitting around and she's like, Oh, and we're going to have four babies.
And she hears this voice four or five. She's like, Oh no, no, no, we're not doing another one after this. Right? But every time she'd say four, she'd have this little voice say or five. (laughs) And then she found out she was having twins,
Sarah Marshall, ND: Oh my gosh.
Jen Schwartz: So, they had number four and five. And she had given birth in birth centers and at home and with the twins, you know, laws are different everywhere, but in Utah, you can't have twins at home legally.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah.
Jen Schwartz: And so she was really pissy about having to be in a hospital, not happy about it. And not only that, when she got there, as she was getting really close to the birth, they told her, well, because it's twins, you have to deliver in the operating room, just in case, right. In case something. And she's like, I don't want to be in an operating room.
They said, well, we have to it's policy, blah, blah, blah. So they're wheeling her down a hall on a gurney, into the operating room and she pushed out the first baby on the way. She's like, Nope, I'm going to do this my way. Right. So it fell into these categories of, you know, fighting against authority and fighting the norms in that case.
Like this is policy and she's like, no, this is my body and my babies, and this is what I'm going to do. And the second one was born in the operating room, but they were both born vaginally and. Absolutely no intervention needed and that sort of thing. So. Wow. Yeah.
Sarah Marshall, ND: You've used the word transformation a lot. What does that mean to you?
Jen Schwartz: So for me, transformation is, you know, going from one state to a completely different state. Right. In scientific terms, water to ice, as a transformation. We take something and we put it in a completely different state and, you know, with, with regards to birth it's...what I saw over and over again, and continue to see in the work I do....is who you are before that birth process and who you are after, is completely different. So, you know, in the example of people earning their own power, it doesn't just go back. Like that woman was like, I'm going to push out this baby in the hall. And then she went, okay, well, I'm going to sit back and be meek and quiet now or something. Right. She just became someone who was a vocal advocate, and not just about birth, but about a lot of things around families and women's rights. And. And that sort of thing. So you know, people who find their voice, your voice doesn't go away after that.
And it doesn't mean it's not sometimes still hard to say what there is to say, but, it's, it's there in the back of your head. Like, no, I really can do this and I'm going to push through the hard, cause I know I'm capable.
Sarah Marshall, ND: You know what I think of like, I think culturally we're here and what my cultural part of my brain, it's just like, well, yeah, obviously they became a mother, so of course they transformed, but I, I think what you're pointing to is something that's either bigger or beyond or separate from. Not just, Oh, motherhood.
Cause we also have a bit of like... totally, you know, putting myself on the line. I'm about to turn 40 in five weeks and, you know, I'm pretty
clear that motherhood of my own children birth by my body is probably not the direction. I mean, I know I'm crystal clear lots of women have babies in their forties. It's actually a place I'm getting to with my own self-expression. Like recognizing that's not been a huge driving force for me. I've always said if I meant to have a child, I'll be pregnant, right. That hasn't happened up until now. And I don't have any plans to like, make that happen. It's not, and that's actually come out of a lot of my spiritual work.
Has been me finding a place where I can be okay with it that's my choice. Surrounded by a culture that pulls for, you're not a real woman until you're a mother.
Jen Schwartz: Right.
Sarah Marshall, ND: And that transition is all about becoming a mother. And then this pedestal, we put mothers on simply because they've given birth, but there's something distinct you're talking about here.
Can you, can you point to that?
Jen Schwartz: Yeah. There's something hugely distinct and you're right. That transition does happen, right. That transformation happens because you aren't a mother. Until you're a mother and then you are. Right. And, and that doesn't go away. I mean, even if you have a baby that doesn't live, you're still a mother, right. When your children are grown, you're still a mother. Like it's there forever once it happens, but it is something bigger than that. And you know, one of the reasons since I was so committed to looking at these conversations is because for many women, they don't have that moment of transformation. Like of the kind that I'm talking about. Right. They sort of go through a, kind of a predetermined path of what birth looks like in our culture and what that looks like is, you go into labor. Yeah, well, there's sort of two paths, right? One is there's a C-section scheduled or an induction scheduled, and you show up when you're supposed to, or you go into labor and you go to the hospital at a particular point, and then there's this thing we call in the birthing world, we call it the cascade of interventions that happens where you get to the hospital and then you get an IV. So that you can stay hydrated in case they need to give you medication.
And then because you have an IV, you don't move around very much or at all, which makes birthing much harder and then birthing stalls. And so then we give you a Pitocin, which speeds up labor, which causes much more painful contractions than normal contractions. And then you get an epidural because Pitocin contractions are almost impossible to deal with. And then the epidural slows everything down and then the babies heart rate drops. And then you go in for a quote unquote emergency cesarean section, or maybe you make it through that part and you give birth vaginally, but at the end, it's this whole medically dictated process, right?
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. Where one thing is cascading into the other potentially.
Jen Schwartz: Exactly.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah.
Jen Schwartz: Right? Like if you hadn't had that IV and you were up and walking around and moving your body in ways that felt instinctive and natural. Probably none of the rest of that would have happened now, obviously, you know, cesarean sections exist for a reason. There are emergencies. Right. it's estimated that about 95% of the C-sections that happen in the United States are unnecessary.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. I've heard that.
Jen Schwartz: That's a really high number. Right. So, you know, Mo-- for most people, that's what birth looks like. And so there's not a moment in that of standing up and going, no, I'm not going to let you do this to my baby or my body. There's not a moment of being so in tune with yourself and the process that the angel shows up overhead, right?
It's sort of this just, you know, this is, we do this and this and this and this and this, and then there's a baby. and, you know, even with, with some women who don't experience that full process that I just laid out, but it's still the same kind of experience. Right. So. What I've found though, is with women who have had that kind of experience when we stop and kind of break things down and take things apart and realize what happened and maybe what didn't need to happen.
And, and everything else, they sometimes have a moment of transformation through that processing. Right. But for women who don't experience things that way. And for the occasional ones who do, there are all those moments that are a transformative moment or series of moments that allow for some sort of physical, mental, or spiritual transformation that happens.
So, you know, I've given you a couple of examples already, but there's just so many more. I mean, I interviewed a woman who had her second baby. That was the birth that we were talking about. And our first baby really was just like that thing I just mentioned. Right. It was the standard hospital birth.
And for her second birth, she had talked to someone who had given birth in a birth center and she thought she was really jealous and also angry. Like, why didn't anybody tell me that that was an option? Why didn't anybody tell me that birth could look different? And the whole time that she was in a birth center, giving birth to her second, she kept having those thoughts of like, people should have told me this, why aren't people talking about this?
Right. And she had this, her mother happened to be a midwife. And so I don't know how she hadn't had the conversation. (inauble) Right. I think her mother, her and her mother had, had like a bit of a falling out earlier in her life. And you know, they'd gotten closer after the birth of the first baby, but. You know, her mom was there. Her mother wasn't her midwife, but she was there for the birth. And the two of them just have these profound moments together of connection. Not to mention that, you know, she went from feeling from her first birth, like a victim of a process and in her second birth to someone who could be totally empowered.
And she said, you know, I was a mother after I gave birth the first time, because you are, but after the second time, she just found it so much easier to trust her intuition, to know what her baby needed and when he needed it, because she had allowed herself to open up to knowing that she needed. Yeah.
Yeah.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. Well, and I'm listening to this and thinking about the cascade of intervention and I have a naturopathic kind of slant to this too, but. Like, what are your thoughts on postpartum depression?
Jen Schwartz: Well, it's, it's huge and obviously needs to be taken very seriously. Right. And, but it comes from a couple of things.
One thing that can just come from is hormones. And especially if you have a tendency towards depression in your life, those various dumps of hormones can happen even if you had the most wonderful spiritual, you know, home birth with no interventions or whatever. But I do think, and I know people are researching and have said this as well. There's a big connection there. Right? So. You know, if you can imagine that there's, there's this moment where you're like, okay, I'm pregnant, I'm going to have a baby. And somebody says, cool, this is going to be the most magical and transformative and spiritual experience you'll ever have. And you're like, Whoa, that's great.
And then instead, you get this hugely medically managed for no reason, most times experience without any magic, without any spirituality, without any real transformation, that'd be a huge let down.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Not to mention, I can totally see going to self-blame. Right.
Jen Schwartz: Oh, absolutely.
Sarah Marshall, ND: There is something you are supposed do or..
Jen Schwartz: My body failed.. Yeah,
Sarah Marshall, ND: I'm incapable of, I don't deserve this. I'm not a real fill in the blank, like yeah.
Jen Schwartz: Yeah. And in most of those stories, you know, when women tell them what you hear is the doctor is a hero. When you listen to stories of women who have had transformative experiences, it's all about them.
Sarah Marshall, ND: They get to be the hero.
Jen Schwartz: I did this, and you know there's support there. Like I will tell you my midwife, when I had my fourth, there was a, there was a moment where she said something to me that if she hadn't said that, things could have gone a different way. Right? So her, her support and her input was critical to my experience, but that's not what I highlight when I tell that story. You know, I highlight that experience. I mentioned with, with Joe getting sick and I highlight what it was like when, you know, I could feel that he was stuck. And my, I was like, okay, I'm not leaving.
I was in my bathroom and I'm like, I'm not leaving here and he's stuck. So guess we're going to go for it. Right. Actually broke my tailbone, pushing him out. But it was just a moment of knowing that that was what was needed and necessary. And I was going to do it no matter what.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Right.
Jen Schwartz: So even though her words in that critical moment were important, it's not about her. So in those stories where the doctor is a hero, the mother then is like almost a non-participant in a way. Yeah. Like you're there, but it's all about the doctors did this and then the nurses did this and thank God they were there because we both would have died.
And that's what they, they get left with often as we both would have died. And it's a really delicate process to unpack that. Because, like you said, people go to guilt and shame and I could have made different choices and you can't go back and change any of that. Not that we can go back and change anything. Right? But especially with something like birth, it's like, if you mess up a trip to the grocery store, next week, you do it differently. When it comes to things like birth, you, you don't get to go back and change that. And, I've, I've noticed there, there are times where. It's so difficult to unpack that, that that creates a depression spiral.
And we have to be really cautious of that too.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Totally. Yeah. I can speak to the hormone side of things, cause that's something that I've seen. Particularly around, adrenal glands and hypercortisolism and where, or at least if they have a what's now deemed the HPA axis dysfunction of the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, like thebrain to the adrenal signal. And the adrenals are the little glands that sit on our top of our kidneys and they help us deal with fight or flight circumstances, you know, accidents, major traumas in our life, birth, right? Like not that birth is a trauma, but that's a time when we need those endorphins and our cortisol and everything on board to help us get through it.
And, in our current culture, people having at least dysfunctional adrenal gland or adrenal gland access systems is really common. And then when we layer on. The fertility side of this and the infertility therapies and the hormones and things. Cause like I do non-hormonal intervention, fertility coaching with all of my, you know, with, with certain clients where we just work on reestablishing the health of their endocrine system and they get pregnant naturally.
Jen Schwartz: Right.
Sarah Marshall, ND: I know that there's some women that that's not going to happen. So it's not like this isn't, we're not scripting for everyone. There's just the percentage of women that go IVF and go through, you know, even embryo transfers that, if they'd done naturopathic work for two years before that pregnancy, they probably could have actually gotten pregnant naturally. And if we could have had a whole different area, and one of the things is in this endocrine system and what can happen is the baby. These adrenal glands start to come online and produce some cortisol around third trimester. And you're basically, you've just inserted a little hormone pump inside your body. So you start to feel great because your hormone levels are coming up, but then you have a fetus producing hormones for 150 or more pound woman.
Jen Schwartz: Right.
Sarah Marshall, ND: And then kiddo comes out depleted and mom gets shut off from her hormone pump when the birth happens and everything crashes as if you just stopped a medication.
Jen Schwartz: Right.
Sarah Marshall, ND: And that can cause a cascade and a tumble. And I know that's only one layer of the story. That's a very physiologic thing that can happen for women as they go through this process.
Jen Schwartz: Right. Well, and we have this built-in protection from that. Right. Which is this massive oxytocin dump that happens when you give birth.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah.
Jen Schwartz: And what they're finding is that the, epidurals in particular, because what you're doing with an epidural is you're cutting off all feeling all sensation from about the middle of your spine down. Yeah. now, you know, there are times when epidurals are really critical. I knew a woman years ago who had a major heart condition and she wanted to have a baby and they told her, if you go through labor, you will die.
So, if you want to have a baby, the minute you feel a contraction you need to go to the hospital and we're going to give you the strongest spinal block that exists because your heart can't take it. Perfect example of where Western medicine is totally important, right? So she got to be a mother, she had two healthy, beautiful, wonderful children and still had her heart condition, right?
Yeah. but for most women it's not necessary. And when you've cut off all that physical sensation, you're also stopping the play of what you're talking about. Your adrenals, releasing hormones and everything else. Now we get an oxytocin dump when you put a baby next to your nose. The smell of a newborn baby, the smell of amniotic fluid, right?
It actually creates that, but it's not the same level that you get. that happens when you have gone through labor and actually pushed out a baby. And you know, so you're talking about, you know, it's like the difference taking two milligrams of vitamin C versus a thousand, right. Very different impact on the body. And it's a longterm impact. Vitamin C you can take more tomorrow. That oxytocin dump? You got one chance, one chance for baby anyway.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Right? Yeah. That's so interesting. So what do you see? Cause you know, a lot of the exploration on HEAL has been about, you know, dealing with diseases, disorders, pathologies, healing, you know, and bringing ourselves back into a state of optimal health.
So what does birthing have to do with healing?
Jen Schwartz: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think, you know, for the most part, there's actually, I'll say there's two things. One of them is there's an opportunity for healing in giving birth, right? If, and especially like things sample I gave, you know, if you've given birth before and had a not great experience, and then you have an opportunity to do it again, and you do your research and you put yourself in a situation where you've got the most optimal situation in order to, you know, to have a healthy and strong and transformative experience. Many women do heal birth wounds by giving birth again. My, my third child was born in a hospital. I was giving birth at home and I started bleeding, which again is an appropriate time to be in a hospital then.
And. And in a lot of ways, it was a really great experience and I'm glad I had it. but there was this conversation for me, which was, you know, I'd had a baby in a birth center. I'd had a baby at home in water, and then I was at a hospital and it felt like leaving it, there didn't feel right. that was part of my reason for having, and especially because I got pregnant and had my baby during my doctoral work, and I'm talking to all these women about these transformative experiences and I'm like, yeah and then my third was kind of disappointing. My fourth, my fourth birth really was an opportunity for me to go back and heal what I missed out on. On that third birth. So I think that's one thing. And obviously, you know, don't go have a baby, so you can heal your birth trauma. That's not a good, good reason to do it.
There were a lot of other reasons I decided to have a baby at that point, but. So I think that's one thing that is a possible, possible thing. But the other thing is, you know, I think healing can come from telling those stories, even the stories that are traumatic, with my dissertation work, I didn't work with people who had what they identified as traumatic experience.
And so I had people self-identify and it really didn't matter what. We wouldn't necessarily fit that into trauma, but they said it was traumatic. I didn't interview those people. And that was just because of the limitations of, you know, I hadn't done my doctoral work yet. I was still learning a lot and I wasn't necessarily the person to be there when someone goes into a full trauma spiral.
Right.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah.
Jen Schwartz: But in my work since then, I've been able to work with people who did have traumatic experiences and really work through and process what happened. And, you know, like I said earlier, it's not like you can go back and change it, but in processing the narrative, you can get to a point of acceptance and healing through it.
And I think the biggest thing really is, you know, it's not just telling those stories, but if we can, and I think we're moving towards there, but it's a slow, slow process, if we can normalize birth in our culture, we can get to a point where as a society, we can heal a collective something that then allows people to give birth in a different context.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. I, you know, speaking of diving into what we don't typically talk about, you know, I, I see normalizing birth inside of an even bigger narrative of normalizing menopause, normalizing female sexuality.
Jen Schwartz: Yeah. All of it.
Sarah Marshall, ND: And I mean female as gender identity, not as biological parts, right. Cause it affects everyone and, you know, And I know there's a lot of work to creating a new normal, you know, a healthier context for male sexuality too.
You know, like, like there's a, there's worlds on sexuality for humanity period. But like, I I've actually been reading this book, "Vagina" by Naomi Wolf and she takes you through the historical conversations we've had about female sexuality and we are still. Massively impacted by the conversations of the Victorian age in particular, where a good woman was an empty mind and an empty vagina, right?
It was virginal. She had no desire and she had no thoughts in her head.
Jen Schwartz: Yup.
Sarah Marshall, ND: And there was a very strong connection between the two. And what's really fascinating is in a very limited amount of research because these are not things, you know, go digging around, trying to even find in depth research on endometriosis or fibroids or, or, you know, female specific diseases. And there's just lacking. Like it's not, there is a whole cultural conversation to break up here, you know, inside of that as well. But she talks about how she had her own personal experience. And you're going to have to read the book to get the exact story correctly. Cause I'm going to paraphrase it here. But what I remember from it, what I was left with was she actually had a spinal injury or a disc issue in the body, like in the lower part of her spine. And it like basically created an unnatural nerve block to her vagina, like blocked sexual function in this process and through MRIs and the work she did to heal and bringing it back on, she learned that there is this really complex, intense neural network in your vagina and each woman's neuro network is distinct. Yeah. And there's an incredibly, like, we kind of like have a little bit of a connection between like men and which brain is the one that's leading them, their penis brain or their head brain. And then actually we're discovering that that's true just generally as our genitalia are a huge part of how our brain functions, how our neuro-transmitters function. And this is one of the things I've started to expand in my conversations. When we talk about. The importance of a good lifestyle and healthy lifestyle. Almost everybody says that, right? And exercise it's diet, exercise, breathing, water, sleep, and sex.
Jen Schwartz: Yes.
Sarah Marshall, ND: It's all of those things and healthy sexuality and healthy sexual expression and healthy sex in your life, whatever that looks like, it can be personal. It can be with a partner. You can have an incredibly rocking, healthy, sensual sexual life, and you may not have a partner. And... there's just, we are homo-sapiens that are sentient beings and birth is central and I, one of my other, I read her blogs and information all the time and of course, as soon as I want to say her name says, I'm gonna think of it in just a second, but she is this incredible sexuality coach and she talks about orgasmic birth.
Jen Schwartz: Yes.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Orgasmic birthing process. What do you know about that?
Jen Schwartz: Yeah. So I do talk about that in my dissertation, and it is a really fascinating facet of birth because, you know, again, if you look at the societal conversation about birth, it's about pain. It's about struggle. It's about, you know, how hard it is and how difficult it is and everything else. I myself have had birth orgasm twice, so I I'm very familiar with it now the first time it was quite shocking. As you can imagine. the second time I was like, Oh, cool, we're going to do this again.
but it is a, you know, if you think about the process of birth as the baby is coming through, they call it the ring of fire. Right? So as the baby's head is actually crowning, there's so much pressure on the clitoris. It's actually, if you're there and in your body and present and able and willing to allow it.
Yeah. It's a pretty intense orgasm and so there has been some, some research on it and it's, again, it's not the kind of thing that people really want to talk about because it's weird or because we don't really care about women's orgasms, right? They're, they're, they're are myths anyway. Right? Just so, so is the clitoris, it's just a myth.
No one can even find it.
What do you
Sarah Marshall, ND: mean? She's having an orgasm and there's no man involved?
Jen Schwartz: Right?
Sarah Marshall, ND: Like wait a minute, right?
Jen Schwartz: Exactly. Exactly. So, yeah, it's a really fascinating facet of, of birth. Because it can happen. It does happen. There were a couple of people that I, that I interviewed that experienced that as well. and just like everything else with, you know, how profound and awesome birth can be, because we never talk about it, it's quite the shock when it, when it actually happens.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Absolutely. Yeah.
And I can imagine concerns. And I mean, not that you can really do a whole lot to suppress what's happening at that moment in time, but like, who knows where that could take somebody, you know that, I mean, there's, there's so much, I haven't been through the process myself getting pregnant and starting to research and investigate.
And I do have a few friends around me who were midwives or birth and coaches or doulas. And. You know, I'm fascinated by it. And I also have the sense culturally, that there's just like so much lost information or information and knowledge, and I'm going to actually use the word wisdom, you know, in the world of passing down from generation to generation, our grandmothers, to our mothers, to ourselves, our aunts, you know, in the communities of that support that we used to have and knowing your own body and trusting your physiology and trusting your body has it and then all the different facets of things that can happen.
Jen Schwartz: Yeah. Well, and part of the issue with that is, you know, my mother was born under Twilight Sleep, which was the cocktail of drugs that they gave women, you know, they would show up at the hospital, they would get this cocktail of drugs and then they would wake up with a baby, not usually with the baby, the babies were off at nursery somewhere. Yeah. And that was sort of the way of birth for a long time. And it was actually the feminist movement that created that. They were like, we shouldn't have to suffer. We shouldn't have to go through this pain and they demanded pain control.
But what happened with that was, you know, during, so during birth women would have to be tied down to beds because you're not just completely unconscious. You're. I'm trying to remember. What's the drug? Oh! Versed, right? Versed is a medication that we give people...
Sarah Marshall, ND: and that was in the cocktail you said?
Jen Schwartz: for medical. Yeah. Versed is something we give people like when my son had stitches, when he was four, they gave him Versed so that he wouldn't remember the trauma of the stitches and he's still there and awake and goofy.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Right.
Jen Schwartz: But afterwards, he had no idea what had happened. Right. And it was the same experience, but for giving birth. So they would tie women to bed so that they wouldn't get up and walk off and accidentally give birth as they were walking around on a hard floor. And, you know, quite often a nurse would come over, lift a sheet and be like, Oh, the baby's here. And, you know, just take it out and clean it up. And eventually the mother would wake up and the baby would be off in another room. So you want to talk about being disconnected? There's no, that's the most ultimate thing right in disconnection there. And, you know, we've, it's not that bad anymore, but. Point the point you made was the, what we hand down from our grandmother's trauma. Right? My grandmother doesn't remember giving birth.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. There's this gap in knowledge first, you know, I don't know how far back, maybe about 80-100 years, you know, four or five generations at least that there's been this alteration in the birthing process and yeah.
Jen Schwartz: Yeah. And keep in mind, you know, that's a white woman. 72 years ago. Right? So in, in other communities, communities of color, in particular, nobody had money to go in and get knocked out and wouldn't have any way cause they were smarter than that. A lot of them, but at least in the culture of white women in the United States, you know, I'm almost 50.
The, so you figure my generation, where did I get knowledge of birth? I mean, I have an answer to that for specific for myself, but I know for most women my age, and then what do we hand down to our children if, what our experiences as well, I had a really great epidural. And then, you know, thank God the doctor was there.
That's, that's what we're handing down culturally. Yeah.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Oh my gosh. I've got two things I want to definitely dive into out of that. But I also want to say it's Kim Anami, she's the, sexuality coach. And she also has a podcast and a great blog and she's irreverent as all get out. So like, this is my warning to my listeners. But I love her. And she actually has a whole, kind of her claim to fame in the beginning was vaginal weightlifting. And she works with Yoni eggs and strengthening. And that was a big aha for me as a naturopath was, you know, she talks about women, post-menopausal using Yoni eggs to strengthen the muscular tissues in the vagina canal. And how that just DUH it brings back circulation. You bring back circulation, you bring back lubrication. And so like she has this whole protocol for helping women with vaginal dryness through, you know, Yoni, egg practices and like this muscular control that goes way beyond the typical Cagle exercise, which have their own place, but this is in depth to that. And so I just wanna put that in and we'll have it in the show notes's references to Kim's work. I actually got to see her on stage. She's spoken at an event. And up until that point, I'd mostly only seen the pictures of her, like lifting a pineapple with her vaginal muscles or like... oh, she's hot, so they're great pictures. But like, but, she was incredible, her vulnerability and authenticity and like how she spoke about a subject that, you know, I consider myself pretty open and educated in this area and it rocked my world. So she's one of my heroes.
Jen Schwartz: That's great.
Sarah Marshall, ND: But I wanna, you know, I mean, obviously you are a white woman in America and 50 and all of that, but it seems like you. You know, my experience of you is you've spent a lot of time around a lot of diversity cultures
Jen Schwartz: yes.
Sarah Marshall, ND: In terms of ethnicity and also in terms of sexual expression and gender roles and gender identities.
Jen Schwartz: Yeah.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Anything you want to share about that, that world? I mean, I know we're specifically talking about birth, but we can expand into also our sexual expression and like just having healthy relationships to our bodies in this way.
Jen Schwartz: Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, I think one thing is, we can look to communities of color for some of that ancestral knowledge that we don't have. You know, the body of black midwives and black doulas in the United States is so ridiculously tiny, which means of course, that women of color don't have support from other women of color when it comes to birth. And you know, I mean, again, the statistics around, you know, negative outcomes in birth are so much higher for women of color. it's just, it's a dismal situation. Yeah. And I think part of that is because, you know, if you're, you're going to be in one of the most intimate experiences of your life, you want someone there you can trust.
And it's pretty clear why most women of color don't trust white women. We haven't exactly been the most trustworthy body of humans for them. And so then, you know, if you go, okay, well, I want to have a natural birth at home home, but all the midwives are white. I might not want to do that. You know.
And so I, I think that's unfortunate, but if you can hear and listen to, and have the opportunity to connect with women of color who are in the birthing world, there's, there's a lot of ancestral knowledge there. There's I'm trying to remember the name of this. It's like you just said, right. As soon as I go to say it, it won't come out of my mouth.
There's a wrapping technique. Where you use a large like shawl or slang or piece of fabric that helps with birth. It helps take it, it helps alleviate pain a bit, but it also helps reposition babies. And someone's going to know exactly what it is and on my brain is gone. But it comes from a Latin American culture and, you know, that's something that most whites midwives don't even know about, even some of the most.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Tuned in or educated.
Jen Schwartz: Yeah.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah.
Jen Schwartz: So I think we can look to communities of color because they haven't, you know, like I was saying earlier with the Twilight Sleep, they haven't lost as much of that ancestral knowledge as white communities, at least in the United States have, You know, and then you talk about the culture around, you know, as a queer person myself, I have two, non-binary children. All three of my boys who are over the age of eight, identify as Bi or pansexual. Right. and I am very involved in that, that whole community here at home. it's another place where birth is often not safe. You know, when you go to a hospital, they want to know where your husband is and your wife can be standing right next to you and there's, you know, unless you happen to be with a doctor or a team of nurses or whatever, where they're very accepting, they're very open, and it's already been. Understood. This is my wife. She'll be with me when I give birth. It can, it becomes an immediately hostile environment. And whether that's, it's not intentional, right?
It's not like they look at you and see your wife and go, Oh, let me see how it can hurt this woman. It's just this societal. We live in a heteronormative society. So if you're giving birth, of course you have a husband. And even if you're straight, guess what? You might not have a husband. Yeah.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. My mom is a Walker of worlds. I mean, my mom, she she's, she, the way I describe it as she's one of those extraordinary humans that stands at the threshold between birth and death, and she's been, you know, talk about another place in our culture. You know, she doesn't have official training as a doula, but she's been a birthing coach for, I think, eight or nine births of friends and family members and, you know, been that supportive family member with that deep spiritual tapped-in knowledge of how to work with, you know, the energies and, you know, one of those births was with a young girl who was pregnant and was having the kiddo. And there was no male partner involved. And like what that was like for her to deal with just the assumptions and the, you know, constantly answering those questions
and all of that.
Jen Schwartz: Yeah.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah.
Jen Schwartz: And it is. It's, it's, you know, it's another one of those conversations in our society that needs to shift. Not everyone's straight. Not everyone's married just because they're pregnant. I mean, you know, it seems so basic and I'm sure there are hospitals around the country where they have some sensitivity training on those issues. And when you walk in the question isn't: "Where's your husband?" It's: "Do you have a partner with you?"
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah
Jen Schwartz: Right? And that, the answer to that might be no. And so then we go, okay, great. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to have this hospital doula who's here on call come support you. Right. I can tell you from my experience and knowledge, those places are ridiculously rare. But I do know that they exist, you know, just like it used to be. Everybody gave birth in some ugly little hospital room on a tiny little bed. Now we have birthing suites. Right. And..
Sarah Marshall, ND: We have gotten there. Yep.
Jen Schwartz: Yes. And not every hospital has those even. I mean, we're not even at that point where they're everywhere, but at least they're available in a lot of places. and so if you do have reasons to be giving birth in a hospital, now there's plenty of medical conditions that make that necessary as a precaution, you at least don't have to do so in a sterile unwelcoming environment, you can do it someplace that feels comfortable and where there's room for you to move and everything else.
Sarah Marshall, ND: And then there's a whole nother podcast on how, unless you are actually in a surgery and you require sterility. All of the amount of diseases that heal faster when they're also not in a sterile, cold environment and people with all kinds of other conditions that, and there's, a hospital I know of in Michigan that is, I think, named for Henry Ford and they have views on 80 acres of land, and every single room actually has a view of nature and there's walking trails and there's an organic garden onsite. And then one of their things is they have animal therapy. So there's eight dogs named Henry and I have a golden retriever named Henry. So like, it's not named for the hospital, but, you know, and, and that, that those interventions alone, right? Like, change in the kinds of food that they're actually giving the hospital. A view, natural environment, they are not even getting into alternative therapies or any sort of utilizing herbal medicine, just that they reduce the average hospital, stay by 24 hours because people just get what they need faster and their body shifts quicker and it's like remarkable, you know, something that can make a difference for. All of our medical institution settings,
Jen Schwartz: Absolutely.
Sarah Marshall, ND: We're starting to discover and uncover that research
Jen Schwartz: Well, and then there's another, you know, related to that, there's the whole conversation around, why would you have a baby in a hospital? Hospitals are where people go when they're sick and with the infectious diseases we do have . You know, you don't.. No, you do not need sterility. That's not what we're talking about, but why would you do that in an environment where, you know, you've got staph infections and you've got, you know, right now, COVID for sure. And there was actually at the beginning of this COVID shutdown, there was a huge, what's the word I'm looking for?
A huge burst of people going, okay I want to give birth in a birth in a birthing center because the hospital's a scary place to be. And the birthing centers became immediately overloaded. And so did the home birth midwives. So, You know, I don't know if that's continued. I know that it happened back in you know, late March, early April.
But yeah. Why would you do that in a place that's known for infectious diseases when you could go somewhere else and even, you know, birthing centers, many of them are attached to hospitals, but there's not, you don't have the cross traffic that you have, in a regular hospital. And so if there is an emergency, you're right there.
And even though the ones that don't, they're not allowed to open without emergency transfer plans. And they have to be close enough to a hospital that they can do that reasonably. So, you know, for people that have that particular fear of like, what if something goes wrong and look, sometimes things go wrong in birth.
Like I said, with my third, I started bleeding and I remember driving to the hospital and my husband said to me, What do you think is going to happen when we get there? I said, look, either I'm going to still be bleeding and they're probably going to have to knock me out and take the baby. Cause that was, there was so much blood at one point in time, I said, or everything's going to be fine. And then it's your job to keep everyone away from me. And it ended up being that second thing. Right. But you know, it was, it was enough blood that as a precaution, we went anyway, and as it turned out, I could have stayed at home and had him at home and I didn't. And I'm, don't regret that decision at all.
Cause it was the right decision in the moment.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, we'll see what we can do about starting to create some resources for people who are in this inquiry of, you know, where do I want to go? What do I want to do? You know, how, where would you point people to look for options given that this is a national, at least, if not international conversation.
Jen Schwartz: Yeah. That's a very good question. You know, I mean, I'm always about do your research, right? And so if you wanna, if you want to do research like. What's actually possible in options and everything else. There's so many good books out there. Naomi Wolf actually wrote a book called "Misconceptions" so it's all about the, kind of the lies of the obstetrical world. And, it talks a lot about that cascade of interventions that I'd mentioned and that sort of thing and so it's a good. You know, if you're, if you're in the world of all, you know, is go to a hospital and get an epidural, it's a good place to start because you kind of get a bigger, breadth of what's possible, all the way through, you know, Laura Shanley years ago wrote a book called "Unassisted" and it's about giving birth at home without any medical support.
Right. There's another book. I can't remember who the author is called... husband, husband-coached childbirth? Or pleasurable, husband-coached childbirth? Something like that, which is also about you don't even need a midwife. Now obviously that's pretty far out for most people,
Sarah Marshall, ND: but there's your spectrum. Yeah. I actually have a friend that she delivered both of her boys at home with her husband. And it's one of the most. I mean, it just blew my mind and that's kind of rare to blow my mind.
Jen Schwartz: Yeah.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Honestly.
Jen Schwartz: My third birth was a planned unassisted birth and, you know, and I say, if you're going to go that far, you really need to have done your research because see, I had to come out of my birthing bubble.
And make a medical decision for myself in the midst of it. And if you don't have enough knowledge and enough information to be able to do that, or to have, you know, your partner, whoever that is with you have that information, you shouldn't be doing that alone. Right? You should have someone at least have a midwife at home with you, if you can't do that, research yourself.
And that, you know, that includes things like taking your own blood pressure if that's what's needed and all those kinds of things. So that you're, you really know what you're doing in the midst of it. So yeah, those, those are kind of a couple of things in birth. I think, you know, the main thing for me is...and all the research shows this, right? If you go to England where most births are attended by midwives, they have better birth outcomes than we do where most here, where most births are attended by obstetricians who are surgeons.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah.
Jen Schwartz: Surgical birth, like I said earlier is sometimes necessary and it's rare. So if you happen to live near a hospital where midwives are attending the births, great. Go interview the midwives, talk to them, you know, see if you feel comfortable with them, ask them what are their protocols, you know, under what circumstances would they turn you over to an OB? And you know, again, there are circumstances where that's appropriate.
And if there's not midwives at your hospital, that's when you reach out and you talk to the birth centers if there are some in your, in your area, there are a few midwives and it's, again, it varies from state to state, but there are midwives who mostly do home births, but who have hospital privileges, meaning they can be with you in the hospital.
You'll also have an obstetrician assigned to you, but the midwife is there as your primary support. So there's a lot of different ways to do this. And you know, some of the women in my, my research work gave birth in hospitals. They had very, standard births in many ways. And they still had transformational experiences.
So it's not give birth in the woods by yourself or you can't transform, right? That's not the message at all, but I think such a huge part of it is doing your research beforehand. One of the, I think another thing that's really, really important, let's see if I can pull up the name of this book. I should be able to, because I use it and talk about it all the time. And yet my brain is gone at the moment. There is a book that is a process through pregnancy of doing art and self exploration while you were pregnant, that to prepare yourself emotionally for giving birth. And also physically, so there are exercises in it that talk about, you know, who do you want there and what kind of environment do you want?
And, you know, if you are going to a hospital, what can you bring with you to make it feel more homey and comfortable and everything else? I'll find the name of that and give it to you since I'm blanking on it right now. So that's another good resource there, but you know, doing your preparation, doing your research and deciding what's going to be best for you.
You know, I wouldn't have had a midwife at my fourth birth, but my husband was freaked out about the idea of doing it without someone. He'd had his four babies hall all before had all been born in a hospital with epidurals in normal ways. Right? And here's his new hippy wife going, no, I just want to do it at home in the bathtub.
And he's like, well, whoa (inaudible) (laughs) for his support then mine, and as fast as it was, it turned out. We didn't need a whole lot from her anyway, but you know, you really have to go with, what's going to have you feel comfortable. And if you're thinking about a birth center and all that's in the back of your mind is fear of what's gonna go wrong, don't do that. Go to a hospital, but find yourself a hospital or an obstetrician who's going to support what you want and what you need. Yeah. Yeah.
Sarah Marshall, ND: That's awesome. Oh my gosh, Jen, thank you so much for all of your knowledge and sharing your stories. And this was just awesome. And I think we've got all kinds of places we can continue this conversation into, but it was really powerful.
Jen Schwartz: Definitely. Yeah, definitely.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Great. Well thank you so much.
Jen Schwartz: Yeah. Thank you for having me.
Sarah Marshall, ND: You bet!
Jen Schwartz: Appreciate it.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Any parting words or did we do it?
Jen Schwartz: I think we did it. I think that last little piece of advice, you know, do your homework and do what works for you and your family.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Absolutely. All right. Well, I so appreciate you. Thank you. Bye.
Jen Schwartz: Bye. (music)
Sarah Marshall, ND: Thanks to today's guest Dr. Jen Schwartz for her power and grace and family love and gender for a full transcript and all the resources for today's show. Visit SarahMarshallND.com/podcast. You can learn more about finding your own healing by going to SarahMarshallND.com or following me on Instagram at @SarahMarshallND. Thanks to our music composer, Roddy Nikpour and our editor Kendra Vicken. We'll see you next time.