SPIRITUAL MIDWIFERY ON THE FARM

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We feel that the people who are doing the work should be the ones to say how it is done. I really believe that-if every woman felt it was safe-deep in her heart she'd prefer to have her gynecological care-her baby-having and all that? handled mainly by women, who tend to understand better.

A typical birth at The Farm costs us about $15 for materials. For religious reasons, we don't charge money for delivering babies, so-at that $15 rate? the amount of money we've saved for ourselves and for the couples and single mothers who've come to have their babies here amounts to well over a million dollars.

We were forced to develop our own primary health care system out of necessity: The nearest doctor was more than 15 miles away. So far, we've provided an outpatient clinic, a neonatal intensive care nursery which is equipped—with incubators, bilirubin lights, oxygen therapy, and so forth—to care for even premature babies, an infirmary, a medical laboratory, a pharmacy, and two ambulances. The facilities are staffed by a physician, six nurses, the midwife crew, two paramedics, 40 state-recognized Emergency Medical Technicians, and about 50 trainees ... all members of our community.

PRENATAL CARE

Prepare yourselfspiritually. As soon as you discover you're pregnant, it's time to start getting ready, because you're going to be accepting responsibility for another life ... a pure new consciousness.

Right away, you should be thinking about your nutrition so that you're eating what you need to in order to grow a good baby and stay healthy, and to go through the work that you have ahead of you.

We firmly believe that the way to get the best nutrition is to be vegetarian. We've been looking at it empirically for over seven years, seeing how healthy our children are. We are total vegetarians, and because we don't eat milk or eggs we supplement the foods that we do consume with vitamin B 12' Our diet is based on soybeans, and we eat a lot of beans in many different forms. [See "How We Make and Eat Tempeh Down on The Farm", MOTHER NO. 47. The community also publishes The Farm Vegetarian Cookbook-available from the same sources listed for Spiritual Midwifery on page 73? which details the fundamentals of their diet—The Editors.]

We've had only two cases of toxemia in pregnancy, compared to a national average of about 33%. We think our diet has a lot to do with that.

We don't smoke cigarettes, and if you're a smoker we hope you'll stop: It's not good for you or for your developing baby. Nor should you drink alcoholic beverages if you're pregnant, because there's a very high incidence of congenital abnormalities in babies born to people who drink alcohol.

As for exercise, the amount you get if you're not in the leisure class seems to suffice pretty well. Walking is probably the best exercise of all, though swimming's good too. But mainly you just need to carry on an active life. Of course, you're going to slow down a little bit because you'll be weighing a few more pounds than you ordinarily do.

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