Return to Radiance with Danielle Venables

098. Birth Trauma, Sovereignty, and the Cost of “Playing it Safe”

• Danielle Venables • Episode 98

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Ever felt caught between worlds when planning your birth? Desiring the empowerment of a sovereign experience while still clinging to medical oversight "just in case"? This raw, unfiltered conversation dives deep into the fundamental contradiction many pregnant women face—and why straddling both paradigms often leads to the very interventions and trauma they hope to avoid.

Drawing from personal experience and countless conversations with new mothers, I explore how the medical system's approach to birth—rooted in the belief that women's bodies need constant management—directly conflicts with our innate wisdom and biological design. When we engage with prenatal medical care while hoping for minimal intervention, we unwittingly enter a system designed to find abnormalities and implement standardized protocols. This creates the perfect conditions for the infamous "cascade of interventions" that transforms natural birth into medical emergencies.

At the core of sovereign birth lies a profound question: do you truly trust your intuition, or are you still outsourcing your power? The hard truth is that partial commitment to natural birth leaves you vulnerable to having your power stripped away entirely. I share candid insights about ultrasounds, monitoring, hospital protocols, and the tactics that erode women's confidence in their bodies—not to shame anyone's choices, but to illuminate the conditioning we've all received about birth being dangerous rather than beautifully designed.

Whether you're planning a hospital birth, considering home birth, or somewhere in between, this episode invites you to examine where your beliefs about birth truly lie. What percentage of trust do you have in your body versus how much are you outsourcing to external authorities? The goal isn't to push everyone toward unassisted birth, but to help you achieve clarity about your values so your birth experience strengthens rather than damages your connection to your intuitive wisdom.

What birth questions are on your mind? Connect with me through comments or social media—I'm passionate about women reclaiming birth as a key part of reclaiming sovereignty in all aspects of life.


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Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Return to Radiance podcast. If you are somebody who desires a more sovereign, empowering birth experience, maybe you've thought about giving birth at home or even free birthing, without medical attendance. If you've thought about how you can possibly manipulate a system that you know is inherently flawed but still have an empowering birth. If you've been sort of struggling or trying to compromise in finding the ideal balance between the medical world and sovereign birth, between the medical world and sovereign birth, this episode is going to be for you. So this is entirely inspired by a message that I received this morning from a friend of mine, and she came into my inbox. We've had many conversations about sovereign birth and home birth, and obviously she knows that I free birthed my son at home back in 2024. And so she came into my inbox and asked how do you avoid ultrasounds, like, how do you know if you're having a healthy baby if you opt out of ultrasounds? And I felt like that was a really important starting point and a really valid and important question to leap off of right. When we talk about sovereign birth, when we talk about this topic, it triggers a lot of people, but it also bumps up against a lot of conditioning when it comes to all of the things that we're taught that we need to monitor and pay attention to and know ahead of time, and it really it's a broader conversation that needs to be had to really decide where do you actually fall on the spectrum, where do your values actually lie? So my answer to her when she came in how do you avoid ultrasounds? How do you know if you're going to have a healthy baby? I just answered her completely candidly, honestly, from one friend to another, and so I'm going to share the same response with you.

Speaker 1:

But I do want to preface this by saying that this is by no means medical advice. In fact, this is quite the opposite of medical advice, and I am not a medical birth practitioner or a medical practitioner of any sort. So I want to make that abundantly clear, that my role, my voice in this conversation is not coming from a medical perspective. It is coming from a place of introspection and a place of honoring each woman and her intuition and the birth that she desires to have, whether that is in or out of the medical field. So I'm going to speak candidly from my opinions, from my experience, but these are my own, and I need you to listen to this episode from a place of taking what resonates and leaving the rest, allowing yourself to open up to possibilities, but also, ultimately, to take radical responsibility for your own decisions, for your own experiences and for what you want birth to look like for you. No external authority has all of the answers and nobody has authority over you to force you to make one decision or another.

Speaker 1:

So I just want to start by prefacing with that, and now let's get back to what did I tell my friend when she asked how do you avoid ultrasounds? How do you know if you're having a healthy baby Immediately? My response to her was just intuition. You just trust yourself, you trust your gut, you trust that your body is going to tell you if something is wrong. You trust that you will make the right decisions for yourself, for your baby, for the outcome of exactly what was meant to happen.

Speaker 1:

And that makes a lot of people really uncomfortable, because so many people will say, oh well, like we have the ability to have these ultrasounds, we have the tests, like why wouldn't you take advantage of those things to be sure? And that's another thing that she kind of came back with is well, what if it has a disability? What if the baby has a disability? And my response to her with that was well, would that change your decision? Like, would you have an abortion 05.30 if this baby did have a disability? And that's really a question that she had to answer for herself, right? That's a question that you take and you think about and you process and you come up with a decision. Because if the answer is yes, you would have an abortion because a baby potentially would have a disability. Then I would absolutely say go and get the testing done, get the ultrasounds, monitor it closely, because if it's going to alter the end result, then it's important to know right. But at the end of the day, if you would proceed with the pregnancy anyway, there is literally no argument for having an ultrasound and knowing ahead of time rather than just not and just dealing with it as it comes right, like there's really no difference other than the timeline of when you find out. Now you could still make arguments that you know there may be other benefits, such as preparing yourself or getting the resources in place ahead of time and all of that and that is great.

Speaker 1:

But I am talking to the women who are sovereign, who are not looking at relying on systems and doctors to save them from birth or motherhood. And with that, with that level of radical accountability, you just have to trust that you can handle whatever God has in store for you, whatever source has in store for you, and that's really my fundamental belief. When it comes to birth, that is something that I've had I had to move through. When we made the decision to free birth and have a wild pregnancy, I declined all of the blood tests. I did end up having one ultrasound, which in hindsight, I didn't even go to the follow-up appointment for that ultrasound, like I really kind of wish I hadn't, but that was our comfort level at the time, and so, again, there's no shame in having different comfort levels.

Speaker 1:

But the thing that I will say is that what I have observed in the last two years, since becoming more involved with women's births even just with my friends and acquaintances and things like that because after doing what we did, I seem to be a bit of a magnet to women talking about pregnancy and birth and their birth plans and their ideal outcome and their fears and all of that stuff, and I'm always so happy to hold space for these conversations, but what I have noticed as a result over the last few years is that the women in my world who have tried to straddle both worlds, who have oh, I'll take some accountability, but I'm still going to do this and this and this. Right, I'm still going to do the ultrasound, I'm still going to do whatever, I'm still going to give birth in the hospital, whatever the case may be, in each of these situations, I have noticed that these women end up having experiences that otherwise could have likely been avoided. Right, I have a friend right now who is pregnant and she went for the ultrasound and they essentially put her on bed rest, claiming that she had placenta previa, which is where the placenta covers your cervix. After asking her some more questions, we realized that it's actually not placenta previa, but it is just a low lying placenta. But regardless, they told her that she had placenta previa, that she cannot exercise, that she cannot have sex, that she cannot do anything and that she just needs to basically be a human incubator for the foreseeable future, and because of that, her mental health is suffering.

Speaker 1:

She is in a very challenging place right now place right now, and as much as I can try to support her through that to the best of my ability. It's one of those things where had she just been listening to her body, had she just been trusting her own intuition and how she was feeling after doing certain activities and things like that, she wouldn't have had those limitations placed on her, and I have full faith that she still would have gotten the feedback she needed from her body for what is okay to do and what is not. But now she's in this position where she's like, well, I'm being told this and so if I rebel against it, I mean, for one, my husband won't let me and for two, I don't trust my own intuition, I can't hear my own intuition, because the parts that feel online right now for me are the part that is rebelling, the part that wants to say, fuck you, I'm going to do what I want, and the other part that's like, well, I should just listen to the doctors, and bumping up against that authority that some external authority knows better than your own body wisdom. And I take a great deal of problem with that, not because some of the advice is inherently bad, but because I have full faith that if exercising was a problem, she would slow down. Her body would tell her and she would slow down. Right, the key is to stay open to these things. But now she's got these rules and these limitations on what she can't do, and that is creating more mental and emotional turmoil than if her body had told her it's time to slow down. Or maybe we shouldn't move in this way anymore, or maybe it's time to rest for a while, right, and then, as we go on, to like the birth side the women that I know that have given birth in hospitals recently, um, you know they go in wanting something unmedicated, wanting minimal intervention or no intervention.

Speaker 1:

Um, but you know, you're, you're trained through your prenatal appointments to be good and and they teach you like, oh, when contractions are like this, then you come in and see us and then what's the first thing they do? They stick fingers up inside of you. And as soon as they stick fingers up inside of you, then they've introduced bacteria. So if your water's broken, it's game over. They've started the clock. There's hospital policies for how quickly this baby needs to be out before you risk infection, where, in actuality, without that external interference, you can actually walk around with your waters leaking or broken for several days Again, as long as you are feeling okay and you're not getting that intuitive nudge of like, hey, something's wrong. Um, it's all about keeping, keeping the interference down, keeping the, the bacteria from going in there, right, so you're not going to take baths and you're not going to stick fingers in there and all of that. But, um, you know immediately that gets sabotaged because not only uh did they introduce bacteria to that, but now they've started a clock and they've started their own policies and they're going to tell you well, you're going to get an infection and die, or you're going to get an infection and your baby's going to die. And all of those things open the door to doubt. They open the door to overriding your intuition and stepping into a place of, okay, well, they know best and I have to trust them. So then what happens? They admit you to the hospital. That timer's going.

Speaker 1:

If labor is not kicking off, naturally, then it's the Pitocin. Well, there's never actually true informed consent with Pitocin, and that's a whole other podcast episode on its own and you can look that up. I'm sure the Free Birth Society or somewhere like that has resources in that realm of the risks that don't get talked about with all of these labor interventions. But you know, then they do, they induce you to get labor going because this baby needs to get out, because they've introduced bacteria, and that creates a risk factor, right? So there's intervention, there's another intervention.

Speaker 1:

Well then Pitocin causes your baby's vitals to tank, or it causes your baby to be malpositioned, because what Pitocin does is it contracts and contracts and contracts and contracts, but it doesn't actually allow the space for your body to move, for your baby to move into an optimal position to descend through the birth canal. So you know, in all of that, then baby's malpositioned and then baby gets stuck, or then you're having a hard time, you know, getting baby to a place where you can push because of the malpositioning. Or you finally get to that place, but your body is tired, your uterus is tired from contracting and contracting and contracting, with no real outcome, because the synthetic Pitocin does not have the same intelligence, the same biochemical makeup as oxytocin, which is that hormone that naturally occurs when you are in labor. So because of that, there's no breaks, there's no rest, there's no slowing down to let baby move, because your body is just being triggered to contract and contract and contract, like I was saying.

Speaker 1:

Um. So then by the time it's time to push, then mom is too exhausted to push, and then guess what? There's the next intervention. It's either forceps or a vacuum, or sometimes both, which is just insane to me. Or it's an emergency c-section because baby's stuck, mom's not pushing, everyone's tanking, vitals are going down because of the pitocin, because of how stressful and traumatic the actual birth was, and then it's just one intervention to another right, and so this is what's called in the natural birth world, this is what's called the cascade of interventions, and I'm not bringing this to your attention to scare you, right, like if you're expecting a baby.

Speaker 1:

The last thing that I want is for you to be fearing birth itself, because ultimately, like the design of birth is inherently effective. Otherwise we would not have survived generations and generations and generations, like point blank. Birth is one of the most natural things that we can do when it is left undisturbed, uninterrupted, and when women are left to their own devices. But in the rise of the medical industrial complex, what's happened is we have been taught to look at authority, to look at doctors, because they know best to override our intuition, and to step into this synthetic world where we need to be saved from birth. And so that is the danger of sort of trying to have one foot in each world, where you know you want a more natural birth and you may even believe that you can have a more natural birth, and you may even believe that you can have a more natural birth, but you're just going to do it in the hospital, like just in case, or you're just going to, you know, go to your prenatal appointments just in case, and again like I'm not telling you this to say don't do it or whatever, but I'm telling you. What happens is they will find things that are wrong with you because they operate on a belief system that things are fundamentally wrong and that pregnancy is a condition that needs to be managed.

Speaker 1:

Where in the natural birth world there is a belief that there are so many variations of normal, there are so many ways that a baby can come into the world, there are so many ways that labor can progress. Sometimes it's small contractions over the span of a week and then all of a sudden it's like 30 minutes of active labor and then pushing right, and other times it's, you know, a typical, more textbook labor, and there's more that goes into the biological side of things too, when it comes to stalled labors and different things like that. But ultimately, as a woman who is giving birth, if you can put yourself in a position where you can relax, you can surrender, you can trust your body and you can surround yourself by people who do trust your body, that will allow your intuition to come through and tell you if something goes wrong and I'm not discrediting that, if there is a medical emergency, that having a hospital is not a good thing, because it is. It is absolutely good to know that if something did go wrong, if you were in the minority, that you could go to the hospital and receive life-saving care. I do think that that is valuable. But what I don't think is valuable is the constant management and interference with pregnancy and birth that then leads to negative mindsets, women and mothers not trusting themselves and poor birth outcomes and traumatic births as a result.

Speaker 1:

And then what comes up after that and this just reinforces the narrative in society that, oh, birth is dangerous or birth is unsafe is that? Then they tell you oh, you hemorrhaged, or you this, or you that, or you couldn't push and you needed us to use the forceps or whatever right? They tell you oh, thank God, we were there to save you and ultimately, had all of those other factors not been present, it wouldn't have come to that anyway more often than not. So then you get women who leave the hospital and then attack other women and say, oh well, it's not safe because this or I almost died, or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah all these stories that the doctor said.

Speaker 1:

But what actually created those circumstances to begin with? And that's what we really need to look at, because when you talk to women who have free birth, when you talk to women who birth at home, with minimal intervention, with actual, legitimate midwives, who are not med wives right, who trust in the birth process and who just step aside and let the woman do what is in her primal power to do, naturally, without interference, the outcomes are actually really good. So why are there so many women almost dying in hospitals, or dying in hospitals, let's be real and so many empowering stories coming from the genuine, real, ancestral, sovereign home births, and that's a really important question to look at. And so, again, this isn't about one thing is better than the other, but it is about being really acutely aware of the tactics and the compliance that gets ingrained into prenatal care. You know it's a system that functions on its own and it's a very profitable system. That would not profit if we were birthing sovereign at home, without medical intervention. And it's also something that even the doctors with the best intentions have been trained in.

Speaker 1:

These, these rituals or these ideas or these, these concepts of you need to save women from birth, or birth is inherently flawed or it's inherently dangerous and you need to to over monitor and and whatever. And you know, if it stalls you need to speed it up and if it, you know, if they're not dilating enough, you need to do this, or if they're, you know all of that conditioning gets pushed onto these doctors as they go through medical school, because they go through a standardized schooling. And the reality is women's bodies are not from a textbook, they are biology. They are more connected with the infinite wisdom of life itself than they are with any understanding that a human would have that they would put into a textbook. So all that I'm saying is that one foot in, one foot out is probably the least ideal approach to things, not because it can't happen where you just have a really good experience, but because it will plant those seeds of doubt and then you will be questioning yourself.

Speaker 1:

And then, even though you want the natural birth, then things go sideways because they're telling you one thing after another and then next thing you know you're even more traumatized by your birth because it was so radically different than what you wanted, as opposed to just kind of putting your blinders on trusting your intuition and committing to the sovereign path, or committing to going through the system and and doing things their way and just not holding expectations to have things any different. Now, I still believe that that can be traumatizing. But I believe it is less traumatic to accept that ahead of time than it is to go in with a birth plan to do things as naturally as possible and then have everything go sideways. I think that that really shakes women to their core. It creates a lot of trauma for both mom and baby. That then gets stored in the body, right, it gets stored in the cellular memory and it has to, you know, get worked through. But it shows up in the foundation of how you mother and how you show up for your baby and your ability to bond with your baby and all of these different things.

Speaker 1:

So it's really important to think about what do I actually want and am I willing to take full, radical accountability for it? Not 50% accountability, not even 80% accountability, but what do I believe, what do I want and am I willing to take full ownership of that? And it's when you take that full ownership of that decision, it's when you take full ownership of your prenatal care, of your birth, of your decisions, that then you are free right, then you are sovereign, because, like I said, if you're 30% still in the medical world, they can pull you in a hundred percent, and that that happens. I've seen it happen more times than I can count in the last couple of years. So that's really the question when you're straddling both worlds, when you're trying to have the best of both worlds, it's like these are the questions that you need to be sitting with and asking yourself, not from a place of fear, but from a place of what do I really believe? Do I believe in my power? Or am I still outsourcing power to external circumstances? Because, again, that is the core of sovereignty.

Speaker 1:

So, to circle back, how do you avoid ultrasounds? You just do. How do you avoid blood tests? You just do. How do you avoid hospital interventions? You just decide to stay out of the system and, quite frankly, like that is my opinion and whether you agree with me or you don't is totally fine by me, but those are, those are my answers to the question.

Speaker 1:

That is, my advice, if you want a sovereign birth, is to take 100%, radical ownership of it, to trust your intuition and to not be constantly like peaking. It's kind of like here's an example Like if you trust your husband but you're still looking through his phone to see if he's cheating on you, do you really trust your husband or are you still peaking, just to be sure, cause you're not actually a hundred percent certain Um and so. That's the level of security that you need to have in yourself, in your intuition, in your body, in your baby and in your ability to navigate the birth portal in an empowered, sovereign way, as opposed to checking in on things and still wanting to micromanage things just a little bit and not letting go of like full control. That's really what it comes down to right. It's like how much do you actually trust? And If you're not a hundred percent, then you are at risk of falling into the medical world's Tactics. And again, there's nothing wrong.

Speaker 1:

I'm not shaming women who birth in the medical system. I'm just trying to leave you with something to think about as you plan your birth Because, ultimately, I am so sick and tired of watching my friends and family, and all of the people that I love and care so deeply about, get abused and traumatized in the medical system. I am so tired of them having that shred of empowerment, that shred of yeah, I want this and I want a beautiful birth and having this beautiful vision, and then having it ripped away from them because of interventions that I knew they didn't need and that I wish they knew they didn't need. But of course, when you're being confronted with that, when they're saying your baby's going to die or whatever, in that moment of course you're going to do it. So I would prefer to just see women not be in that situation to begin with, and that is my personal opinion, that is my personal experience with it, and so, hopefully, this episode just gives you something to contemplate, something to think about, somewhere to gauge where am I at? What percentage of trust do I have versus where am I still outsourcing? What percentage am I still outsourcing? What percentage am I still outsourcing?

Speaker 1:

And again, it's not to bring up shame or guilt, it is literally just to check in with yourself and to see where there might still be work to do, where you may need to decondition or where you just need to own the fact that I'm okay with not taking 100% responsibility and that's that right. So, no shame, no matter what you choose, all that I ever hope for anybody in my world or outside of it is that they have an empowering birth, that they have a birth that does not leave them scarred and traumatized, and that they have healthy, beautiful babies that they can bond with and, um, you know, consciously parent. That's all I want, um, so I personally believe it starts with birth. You may agree or disagree with me, and that's okay. I honor you. You are still welcome here, of course, um, but that's what I've got for you today.

Speaker 1:

So I'm curious if you listen to this episode, what other questions do you have, like my friend's questions about how do you avoid this, or how do you avoid that, or how do you talk to your husband about your desire to home birth, or what do I need to do to prepare? I'm happy to go through all of these things again, just through the lens of my own experience, through what I've learned and where I've been and the stories I've heard, um, because I really do believe that women reclaiming birth is a key part in reclaiming life itself and our sovereignty, um, within that. So let me know in the comments if you're watching this on YouTube. I think podcasts actually now have an option to comment too, so you can check that out, um, or you can reach out on social media If you have any other questions that you want me to cover on this podcast.

Speaker 1:

Um, and I just hope that if you are expecting um anytime in the near future or the distant future, that you have the most amazing, beautiful, empowering birth, no matter what you choose. So that's what I got for you today. I hope you have a fantastic week ahead and I'll talk to you soon.