Our bodies naturally produce body hair to protect us from the elements. The healthiest most natural thing you can do with your body hair is to leave it the way it is. American society has worked very hard to promote hairless bodies as the norm, despite the problems with it. Body hair preferences should be left up to each individual person. Should you decide that you do want to get rid of your body hair, I’ve created a guide for the best way to do this for your health and the environment.

I was no-shave for years. As a teenager in high school, I became fed up with the societal pressure and standard of beauty for women surrounding their body hair. I decided to give it up. I knew that choice was better for the environment and by far the best alternative to eco-friendly shaving, buying a reusable razor, and making my own shaving cream. Yes, skipping it all together was by far the best option.

That was three years ago. I’ve learned quite a bit since my experiment. I’ve learned that people today really don’t care what you do with your body hair. I’ve learned that shaving takes a lot of time, and since giving it up, I’ve saved time, water, and money. I’ve also learned that I prefer the look and feel of shaved legs. All other body hair is fine. I’ve even grown to appreciate it. But I couldn’t shake missing the look and feel of shaved legs. So I took the plunge and decided to give it a shot again.

My sister had some extra razors laying around, so I borrowed one and used some soap she had on hand (that I deemed better that her shaving cream). Here’s what I found.

If I’m not taking proper care of myself and I’m not eating as well as I should, if I use cheap razors and soap, the inflammation in my body can cause some minor razor bumps.

Regular soap is terrible. It dries out my skin and furthers the minor irritation I was feeling as a result of the inflammation.

Smooth legs are great, but they don’t last very long. Without a super close shave, within 12 hours my leg hair is already growing back. So as much as I enjoy shaved legs, it probably won’t be a regular thing for me.

Lastly, I found cheap razors do not deliver a close shave. They’re really terrible.

Regular razors and regular shaving cream can often cause razor burn and other skin irritation. This, more often than not, is a health problem caused by too much inflammation. Using a high-quality simple shaving cream with a safety razor (along with the proper diet) can help eliminate this problem.

Your disposable razor is doing more harm to the environment than you realize. Just like straws and plastic bags, razors are another disposable plastic product that is ending up in our landfills and oceans. The EPA reported in the 1990s that America produced 2 billion disposable razors and blades a year. Recent reports show that 163 million people buy disposable razors each year.

In addition to the environmental impacts, plastic is a known carcinogen. Using your plastic disposable razor won’t cause cancer all on its own, but we should all be actively working to detoxify from plastic toxicity and avoid it whenever possible. The culmination of our massive plastic use coupled with our poor diets and inability to detox has ultimately led to a society that is much sicker than it used to be.

So, what’s the alternative? If your disposable razors are wreaking havoc on the environment as well as irritating your skin, and the no-shave lifestyle isn’t for you, I’ve got an alternative.

Safety Razors

Safety razors are reusable razors similar in design to your current disposable razor. The big difference is that you don’t throw them away. They use a single razor blade that you replace when necessary. The single blade design coupled with the weight of the razor delivers a closer shave than your modern disposable razor.

Safety razors have been around for generations, and they seem to be making a comeback. Shaving enthusiasts enjoy the process of shaving with a quality safety razor. Most people find they deliver a closer, smoother shave with less irritation.

Similar to reusable menstrual products, safety razors can be a bigger investment initially, but save money in the long run. You can buy a quality safety razor for under $50, and then you may never have to buy another one again.

For the purpose of this article, I bought a vintage Gillette safety razor for around $15. You can buy a safety razor new, but if the environment is your top priority, buying used is best. You’ll also be likely to get a better razor for your money if you buy vintage.

Through my research, I decided to go with Gillette, because Gillette safety razors from the 1940s-1970s seem to be widely considered some of the best safety razors available.

I tested out the safety razor with three different shaving creams: Skintimate shaving cream, Dr. Bronner’s shaving soap, and homemade shaving cream.

Shaving with a safety razor is slightly different than shaving with a disposable razor. There’s no need to apply pressure like you would with a multi-blade disposable razor. Just hold the razor at a 45-degree angle and allow the weight of the razor to cut the hair. The weight of the razor and the sharpness of the blade is enough to deliver a close shave without the extra pressure. It might take some time to get the hang of the new technique. It can be easier to knick yourself with a safety razor, especially when you’re first learning to use it. Using the razor is not my area of expertise, so this article goes into detail about how to use a safety razor.

The safety razor did provide a closer shave than a regular razor, although I’m not sure I would have noticed much of a difference between the two had I not heard that safety razors provide a closer shave.

In order to ensure the closest shave possible, you should exfoliate beforehand. I didn’t! Getting the closest shave wasn’t my top priority, so I didn’t go through the process of making an exfoliator at home. Not to mention the process of exfoliating can irritate the skin.

I washed my legs first in an attempt to scrub some of the dirt off and used hot water to make sure the hair follicles were soft enough. Using the safety razor was very simple. I was worried I would have to be extra careful to ensure that I didn’t cut myself, but it was easy. I found that shorter strokes worked better compared to the longer strokes you might use with a disposable multi-blade razor.

Shaving Cream

Shaving creams, like most soaps and face washes, are full of synthetic fragrances and chemicals that are bad for your health and can irritate your skin. Going to the store and buying a disposable can of shaving cream for a couple of bucks only to throw it away in a couple of months is definitely not something I’ve missed since giving up shaving. However, for the sake of this article, I went to the store, bought a can of shaving cream, tested it out, and compared it to my homemade method. I also compared the cheap shaving cream to Dr. Bronner’s shaving soap.

The homemade shaving cream I tried was super simple and only had three ingredients. It was also a lot of fun to make!

• 1 cup of Dr. Bronner’s Pure Castile soap
• 3/4 cup of Baking soda
• 1 1/2 cup of Water

Read the original recipe here. It goes into more detail, but it’s pretty simple. Stir all your ingredients together on the stove and heat on medium-high. After the ingredients foam up to the rim of the pot, remove it from the heat and allow it to cool. After it cools, take out the foam that has separated from the liquid, with a slotted spoon. In another bowl whip the foam to the consistency that you like, and then store it in a mason jar.

The cheap shaving cream from the drugstore caused skin irritation. It burned slightly upon application and later, my skin was itchy. I broke out in razor bumps almost immediately, and it dried out my skin more than the other ones did.

Dr. Bronner’s shave soap works just fine. It wasn’t a miracle product that amazed me, but it’s a perfectly good shaving soap and it’s high quality. It’s a little on the pricey side, and it might be hard to find outside of a health food store.

All of the products dried out my skin at least to some degree. I find that anytime I use soap, no matter how good it is, it does dry out my skin as it strips my body of its natural oils. If you find that soap dries out your skin as well, I would recommend using coconut oil on your legs after you shave, as opposed to a regular lotion.

I recommend the homemade version above any other version. It’s by far the most affordable and gets the job done just as well if not better than any shaving cream I’ve bought at a store. This version also has the lowest carbon footprint, since you’re making it yourself.

Conclusion

I don’t shower on a regular basis, so I won’t be shaving all the time, But when I do, I’ll be using a safety razor and homemade shaving cream. Do not underestimate the power of a good quality shaving cream. I noticed a massive difference between the cheap can I picked up from the drug store and the shaving cream I made at home.

For the most organic/eco-friendly lifestyle, I would recommend forgoing shaving altogether, but I get that that’s not realistic for everyone. If you are going to shave, making your own shaving cream and using a safety razor are likely your best options, both for your health and the environment. If you make the switch from a disposable razor and cheap shaving cream to eco-friendly alternatives, you’ll likely notice a difference.

Sources:

• How To Shave Your Legs With A Safety Razor
• DIY Eco-Friendly Shave cream
• 2 Billion Tossed Per Year: What’s The Most Wasteful Bathroom Product?

Professors at MIT have referred to the San Onofre nuclear power plant as a “Chernobyl waiting to happen”. The San Onofre nuclear power plant is full of nuclear waste and is located along the coast of southern California on “Earthquake bay.

Eventually, in 2013 the plant was shut down after a radioactive leak was discovered. Now, Orange county is left with canisters of nuclear waste with no permanent place to send them to.

If this nuclear waste does end up being transported it will likely just end up in New Mexico or Texas in disenfranchised communities lacking resources to properly store or dispose of the waste.

Nuclear plant leakage is such a common problem that when reading up on the history of different nuclear plants, Wikipedia has an “incident” page where you can view past nuclear leaks.

Recommended: How to Eliminate IBS, IBD, Leaky Gut 

The decision of what to do with this nuclear waste is obviously a big one, yet ther person who decides what happens to the nuclear waste is a judge in an urban courthouse who ran unopposed in his last election.

Permanent compositories, canisters only last 200-300 years clock ticking, why should communities have to store nuclear waste when there’s no guarantee it will be moved.

To learn more about the problems with nuclear waste storage check out the video below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0diB3ZnxNw

The price of lumber was around $300 per thousand board feet this time last year. In a year the price of lumber has risen 400% to $1,686 per thousand board feet. This surge in prices has added $39,000 to the price of a single-family new home and $13,000 for a multi-family home.

The surge is caused by an increase in demand, a shortage in labor supply, and in small part, tariffs on imports from Canada.

Many are turning to hemp construction materials as lumber prices don’t seem to be dropping anytime soon. Hemp can be used in more than 25,000 products like fibers, textiles, paper, construction, insulation materials, food, and fuel.

Industrial hemp was banned nationwide in 1937 but in December of 2018, industrial hemp was legalized with the passage of the Agricultural Improvement act.

Recommended: How To Heal Your Gut 

Other countries in Europe have already been using hemp products for years while the U.S is far behind in manufacturing and using these products. The hempcrete block similar to concrete blocks used in construction are lighter, easier to produce, do not degrade over time, absorb carbon, and assemble like legos.

For around $30,000, someone building a new home can have enough hemp blocks shipped to them in around 6 to 8 weeks. While most of the companies manufacturing these blocks are currently in Europe, they are finally coming to the United States. Texas, Missouri, Arizona and New Mexico are in talks to have hemp block factories constructed in the near future. In Pennsylvania, the blocks are already being manufactured.

As Wood Prices Surge 400%, Hemp Homes Are Cheaper, More Efficient, and CO2 Negative

Recommended: How to Eliminate IBS, IBD, Leaky Gut

Russell Brand shared his thoughts on the prospect of vaccine passports in a recent video while examining some of the problems with tracking those who are vaccinated.

One of the biggest problems with the vaccine passport is how the vaccine data will be controlled, and who will control it. In the US, we don’t have a universal health care plan, and consequently, we don’t have a database to store information like that. Because of this, big tech has since stepped in with its own ideas for databases to track those who are vaccinated and those who aren’t. To those who pay attention to the track record of big tech, this is extremely concerning. These companies don’t have a history of protecting the best interest of the people.

Additionally, the government itself has a poor track record of keeping its word. With promises that something like a vaccine passport would only be temporary, maybe for a year or so many people are reluctant to trust this based on experiences such as the patriot act following 911.

Related: How To Detoxify and Heal From Vaccinations – For Adults and Children

“Often disasters and times of crisis are used to leverage further power for already powerful entities” 

Vaccine Passports: THIS Is Where It Leads

Of course, not everyone wants or is able to get the vaccine. As Brand says in the video, which you can watch below, the concept of vaccine passports raises fears of a “two-tier society” in which those who are vaccinated get to enjoy everyday things like music and sporting events, traveling, or going to the movie theatre, and those who aren’t vaccinated, are shunned from activities that are considered basic freedoms. This is an even bigger problem in a world where we are already in many ways divided like this. Marginalized communities are likely the ones who would pay the consequences of not getting vaccinated. Rather unwilling or unable, many marginalized communities have good reason to reject the vaccine with a history of being hurt by our government and health care systems.

Being an athlete can take quite a toll on the body, even with a great diet. Over weeks of training I’ve found that even on the best diet, I’m bound to run into injuries and soreness. That being said there are several things that make a big difference in how I feel the next day and rather or not I’m able to train the next day.

Currently, I’m training for a Brazilian Jiu-jitsu competition in May. I’m new, and my workload isn’t nearly that of a seasoned professional athlete, but for the average person, it’s intense.

Every day I do a full body weight lifting workout, yoga, stretching and breath control, 100 bodyweight squats, three sets of push-ups and pull-ups, drilling and training with my dad for about 20 minutes, a mile run, and training at the gym for 3-4 hours a day.

Most injuries I get heal quickly. Since starting Brazilian jiujitsu I’ve suffered jammed toes, a bruised trachea, a pulled quad muscle, and most recently a pulled muscle in my rib area near my spine. Every other injury has been quick to heal, gone in three days at the most. My rib injury took longer to heal. Even after it got better, I spent weeks being sore in that area and having to pay special attention not to reinjure it.

I’ve got a competition soon so extended time off isn’t an option, nor is any sort of pain management that would slow my healing long term. I don’t take pain medication of any sort, nor do I use recreational pain relief like cannabis. Cannabis and over-the-counter pain relief, as well as prescription pain medication all slow down the healing process exponentially for temporary relief.

I view my pain (and many other things in life) like a credit card. Using medication to relieve pain temporarily means dealing with a longer lasting injury, and more pain in the long run. For instance, if I have an injury that hurts at a 6 out of 10, I can smoke some weed or take some other pain medication. But once it wears off that 6 becomes a 7, maybe an 8. And of course, the next dose of pain relief won’t be as effective unless you up the dosage. That’s not my idea of a desirable feedback loop.

To promote healing, we do hot-cold compresses switching back and forth to attract blood flow and inflammation for healing. In the end, we use lots of deep tissue oil on the area. Deep tissue repair oil is my number one recommendation for pain relief and healing if you’re only going to use one thing to aid in the healing process. I use it multiple times a day when I feel sore and before or after a workout. Deep tissue oil has menthol crystals, cayenne, wintergreen oil, and other things to promote healing and attract blood flow to the target area.

I also do hot epsom salt baths as often as needed. It’s nothing revolutionary, but epsom salt does help release tension, relax the muscles and prevent soreness.

Many people recommend Boswellia, an herbal extract, to help with inflammation and pain. Although I’ve never used it, you can read more about it and its benefits in this article.

I stretch and do yoga every day to work on flexibility and aid in healing as well. Even if I’m injured to the point of being unable to workout, I still stretch for movement and healing.

Many other athletes have done down similar paths of using natural remedies to help heal, but very few go deep enough to get the full benefits. Acupuncture and chiropractic care are two examples of holistic routes that some people go down, but as great as they are, they’re really only temporary pain relief. Acupuncture and chiropractic work can be great aids for the body in addition to a healthy diet and routine, but they don’t fix any problems on their own.

Diet

Without a healthy diet, I wouldn’t be able to do this every day, but I’ve learned that there’s a difference between fueling my body for everyday life, and my diet when I’m training. When I’m training, I eat a high caloric diet with lots of protein. My main sources of protein are eggs, meat, and cheese. I generally eat less than a pound of meat a week. I have a little bacon in every salad, and between one and three nights a week, we’ll have sausage or bacon in dinner. I also eat homemade beef jerky for protein in between classes.

Eating an anti-inflammatory diet is probably the most important part of my healing process because it goes beyond just healing. My diet is even more strict than it was prior to fighting, although prior to fighting I ate better than almost anyone I knew. I have to eat a diet that not only aids in healing but prevents me from getting injured frequently. With the right diet, you can make your body impervious to injury. I don’t sit around and wait for an injury to start eating a diet that promotes healing.

Every day I eat a large salad with lots of different vegetables. Diversity is an extremely important part of a healthy diet that many people are missing. There are lots of professional athletes who have figured out that a healthy diet allows them to perform radically better, along with recovering faster and overall feeling better. That being said, not many people have figured out that there’s a big difference between eating some kale salad and eating a 10-cup salad with kale, collards, rainbow chard, spinach, lettuce, cabbage, and more. My salads have at least 10 different vegetables and herbs in them. This article goes into how I make my salads and cranberry lemonade.

Three to four times a week I drink my “anti-inflammatory smoothie“. I make it with an abundance of anti-inflammatory foods like ginger, pineapple, cranberries, tart cherries, and turmeric (to name a few). I drink lots of cranberry lemonade to flush out toxins and inflammation, as well as stay hydrated. Lastly, I obviously avoid inflammatory foods. I limit my grains and avoid corn (although occasionally we make homemade tortillas). I don’t even eat oatmeal anymore, because it’s too similar to gluten in the way it digests and causes inflammation.

Many fighters and bodybuilders eat lots of oatmeal as a good source of protein and fuel. For many people, it’s great. But, like most other grains, it’s inflammatory. I feel it when I eat them. I’ll bet if you’re paying attention, you can too. When I’m in need of protein and fuel I stick to things like eggs, homemade beef jerky, walnuts, chia seeds, and raw sheep’s cheese.

It seems like the list of foods I can’t eat is extremely long, but the list of foods I can and do eat is even longer. The guidelines are pretty simple, make everything from scratch, eat tons of raw veggies, eat tons of cooked veggies, and avoid any and all things processed.

Supplements

With a healthy diet the average person shouldn’t need to take supplements everyday when they’re healthy, but someone who’s pushing their body on an athletes level may find that they function better with supplements.

Currently, I take Sf722 every day, generally because I eat a lot of fruit. Sf722 also helps pump my body full of good stuff similar to salads. Without Sf722 my skin can be prone to breaking out from rolls on the mats, and my healing and recovery slows. I also take Abzorb, or other enzymes to help with digestion, especially if I eat pasteurized nuts. I take vitamin D, Vitamin B, and thyroid and/or pituitary glandular supplements to prevent endocrine system crashes.

When you’ve taken antibiotics or medication or done anything to eradicate your gut microbiome, your gut isn’t producing enough vitamin B. This can be one of the last things to correct itself after you’re healthy. Taking vitamin B helps heal your gut and helps the endocrine system by providing your body with vitamins that your gut should be producing.

When you’re overweight, even just a small amount your body has a hard time assimilating vitamin D from the sun. not to mention most of us don’t get enough sunlight anyways. Being overweight also leads to extra stress on the kidneys (and lower back) and the endocrine system.

Sleep

Diet and sleep are equally as important for overall health, and when it comes to how sore I am and my recovery time for an injury. Unfortunately, it can be hard to get a good night’s sleep when my injury is severe enough, but it’s always a top priority.

I always get a minimum of 8 hours of sleep. Regardless of the quality of sleep, I’m in bed trying to sleep for at least 8 hours. Sometimes depending on the workout the day before, or how an injury is healing, I can get more than 10 hours of sleep.

Related: Holistic Guide to Healing the Endocrine System and Balancing Our Hormones

Training

While training anything contact or combat related it’s extremely important than you learn how to protect yourself from injury while drilling and rolling. It took me way too long to learn how to fall properly in jiujitsu, and it’s still a work in progress. Falling down wrong was the number one cause of injury for me while training.

Related: Running Without Knee Pain

That being said, once I learned how to protect myself from injury I found that training was actually extremely important for healing my most recently injury. So, if you can move, move. Staying active and using your body is extremely important for working your muscles and building them back stronger after an injury.

Generally, I use the rule use it or lose it. Broken bones often don’t need casts (and strong healthy bones are harder to break). Staying active is usually your best bet for healing quickly.

Conclusion

Some days I wake up barely able to move! Training this hard has been really intense, but I know that with the way I do things, my recovery time is radically faster than anyone else I know doing the same thing as me.

In my experience the most important thing to do is to be in tune with your body to an extreme. The moment something isn’t right I can tell, and I can feel a difference in the way certain foods fuel my body. I track my sleep and my diet, and when things aren’t working the way they should I back track and examine where I might have gone wrong.

This takes time, and it takes mistakes. I’ve experimented with lots of different foods and routines and I’ve seen how certain things make me feel, and how they effect my performance. Working out and being active is a wonderful thing, but it doesn’t mean much if you’re not healthy enough to sustain it.

As greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise many people are looking for an easy one-size-fits-all solution to our climate problem. One of the trendiest options is going vegan. Over recent years people have raised questions about the impact of eating massive amounts of meat and suggested that everyone going vegan could solve our climate crisis.

So, what’s the real environmental impact of our meat, and can going vegan really save the environment?

Many are concerned about the amount of water and food it takes to produce a pound of beef, but the reality is a typical cow’s water footprint is 94% green water. This means that 94% of a cow’s water footprint is just rainwater, and of course, once that water is used it’s not gone forever. It’s urinated out and cycled back into the environment. In fact, almonds end up using less green water than beef.

Recommended: How to Eliminate IBS, IBD, Leaky Gut 

Additionally, many are worried about the amount of food it takes to produce a pound of beef. Couldn’t we be feeding more people with all that food? More than 85% of livestock feed is non-human edible, and in the end, 4.3 billion kilograms of non-human edible food gets fed to livestock.

In a recent “What I’ve Learned” video the narrator goes into many of the common problems with the carbon footprint of our meat and why it’s actually more nuanced than you might think.

At the end of the day, the government and big businesses need to be held responsible for their role in destroying the environment. The role of fixing the environment does not fall on the individual consumer, but rather, the producer. If you’re curious about how eating sustainable agriculture stacks up against going vegan check out this article.

The choice of where and how to have a baby should be up to each individual mother. There are benefits and drawbacks to all different kinds of births depending on a number of factors.

For a healthy mom and a healthy baby, we tend to favor a natural home birth, but it’s not for everyone. I personally favor home birth for the freedom it allows the mother and the baby. Additionally, childbirth in hospitals has a long and dark history, and often times do not have the mother or baby’s best interest in mind.

Before hospitals, we were obviously delivering babies at home. So why did we stop? How did childbirth go from being a natural, fairly simple process to being a health emergency?

Related: Circumcision, the Primal Cut – A Human Rights Violation

Childbirth in Native American tribes/prior to western colonization

Prior to western colonization, women gave birth with minimal problems as well as minimal recovery time. A healthy woman could deliver her own baby, recover quickly, and resume a normal life almost immediately.

When we promote at-home birth, this is the model we try to strive for. Birth in Native American tribes appears to be the most natural example of birth we’ve got on record. It would also be safe to say that prior to the colonization of North America, Native Americans had a much healthier lifestyle than the white man.

There is little to no data recorded about what childbirth was like, how often mothers died, and how often babies died in birth. It has however, been reported that women often returned back to normal life very quickly after childbirth.

depart alone to a secluded place near a brook, or stream of water . . . and prepare a shelter for themselves with mats and coverings, where, provided with provisions necessary for them, they await their delivery without the company or aid of any person. . . . They rarely are sick from child-birth [and] suffer no inconveniences from the same.

Native American customs of childbirth

At home birth prior to hospitals after colonization

Until the mid-early 20th century, home birth was still the norm. Women gave birth at home and births were attended by female relatives and midwives.

Related: How To Detoxify and Heal From Vaccinations – For Adults and Children

Birth was usually painful, and difficult and both mothers and babies often died during childbirth. Your risk of dying from childbirth was generally around 1-2% per child. Women that had seven or eight children (as many women did) had a much higher chance of dying from childbirth. Additionally, there was about a 20% chance that your child wouldn’t make it to their fifth birthday.

As early as the mid 18th century we saw an increase in doctors attending childbirth as opposed to midwives. The logic was that doctors had more training about anatomy and were thus more qualified to deliver children.

Wealthy women began looking for more pain-free alternatives to traditional childbirth in the late 19th century. In 1900 half of babies were still delivered by midwives. By 1935 only 15% of babies were delivered by midwives.

Hospital births became more commonplace in the mid-early 20th century after the push for pain relief during labor. In the 19th century, prior to twilight sleep, other drugs were used to help eases the pain of childbirth. Most commonly, chloroform was commonly used to help ease pain, but prior to chloroform, ether was used in the 1840s. Later Chloroform was popularized by Queen Victoria, in 1853 when she gave birth to her eighth child.

What Is Twilight Sleep?

Giving birth in hospitals became widely popular in the early 20th century. Prior to a push for hospital births, we saw more and more doctors attending home births. It was said that doctors were more equipped to deliver babies, as they had actual medical training, and a better understanding of anatomy, compared to midwives who often learned the trade from their mothers, or from giving birth themselves. This eventually led to more births in hospitals.

Additionally, poorer and middle-class families began giving birth in hospitals for sanitary reasons. Houses were often crowded and dirty, not an ideal place to give birth. Hospitals were also sometimes cheaper than a professional midwife.

Shortly after the popularization of childbirth in hospitals, twilight sleep became popular.

Twilight sleep is a form of childbirth that was labeled as painless, due to the drugs women in labor were given. Women were often given a mixture of scopolamine and morphine to reduce pain and put them in a state of semi-consciousness or unconsciousness.

Twilight sleep was developed by German doctors in the early 20th century. Wealthy German women would travel from all over Germany to give birth under twilight sleep. Women would travel to the clinic as early as a month before childbirth to allow doctors time to figure out the proper dosage of medication in order to assure women experienced painless childbirth.

When American doctors began the practice of twilight sleep themselves, they did not take the time to assure each woman was given the proper dosage of medication. The twilight sleep drugs were treated as a one size fits all. Additionally, doctors in America often did not have the proper medical training to go through the medical procedures necessary for a successful twilight sleep birth.

Women were often tied down to beds and left alone for hours at a time. Other times they were left in a room with many other women also in labor. Twilight sleep didn’t actually make labor painless, often women would thrash and scream in pain and would then come back to consciousness after birth and have no memory of the pain, or the delivery itself.

After labor, women often had difficulty bonding with their babies, difficulty breastfeeding, and severe postpartum depression. Women also had very traumatic memories of childbirth if they were able to remember the experience.

Twilight birth was popularized around the time of the women’s suffrage movement, with a push for more painless alternatives to natural childbirth. Later, in the 60s, following the hippie movement, there was a push for natural childbirth once again as women learned more about the horrors of twilight sleep.

Recommended: Best Supplements To Kill Candida and Everything Else You Ever Wanted To Know About Fungal Infections 

Modern births in hospitals

Today when we think of childbirth, especially in the U.S, we usually think of birth in a hospital, with a woman hooked up to IVs stuck in a bed under fluorescent lights. That was the vision of childbirth that was presented to me for many years, and it was not something I wanted to experience.

Modern day birth in a hospital it generally not as disconnected from nature as it was in its peak in the 1950s. There are generally options for the mother, such as water birth or natural child birth with no epidural.

That being said, often times in a hospital you’re under a time limit. If you don’t give birth in a certain amount of time you may be given drugs to induce labor, or you may have to undergo a c-section.

With the possibility of a C-section, women are not allowed to eat or drink anything except ice chips, when in labor. Additionally women are often times constrained to the bed and are not supposed to move around.

Of course, there’s also the atmosphere of the hospital. Hospitals are very sterile, less than welcoming environments. Nurses and doctors are constantly coming and going, and overall it can be an unfamiliar uncomfortable environment to give birth in.

Many hospitals in the U.S have extremely high rates of c-sections (some up to 50%). The CDC recommends that C-section rates stay around 15%, where the World Health Organization recommends no more than 10%. The current national average is around 34%.

The pain of childbirth is one of the biggest concerns today that goes into rather women want to have natural childbirth or use medical intervention. While an epidural may temporarily relieve the pain of childbirth, upwards of 35% of women who have an epidural experience hindered ability to breastfeed, difficulty to bond with the baby, or difficulty recovering after pregnancy.

Compared to women who give birth at home, women in hospitals have a higher rate of intervention (c-section, epidural, etc). Women in hospitals have higher rates of postpartum infections and higher rates of postpartum hemorrhages.

At home births today

The reality is, we’ve been doing childbirth at home longer than we’ve been doing it in hospitals! When I think of being pregnant and giving birth now I can’t possibly imagine being in a hospital or really anywhere other than the comfort of my own home.

Many studies show that at home birth is safer than hospital birth, in many cases. Home births have less of a chance of C-section, hemorrhage, infant distress, and infection, to name a few.

Today, around 1% of births are home births in the U.S.

At home births allow you to be completely in control and in charge of the decisions that are being made (provided you have a midwife who works well and communicates with you or you do an unassisted home birth).

The moment baby is born you have the opportunity for skin-to-skin contact for as long as you and baby need. There’s no risk of medical interference (20 years ago when I was born, doctors took me away and gave me antibiotics against my parents’ will). You have time to ensure the natural progression of childbirth as it should happen, rather than on a hospital timeline, and without hospital intervention.

For a healthy mother who’s had a healthy pregnancy, a home birth will probably be your healthiest option. At home, you have the ability to allow your body to give birth in its most natural state. Allowing your body to give birth in its own time, naturally in whatever way works best for your body is the best thing for you and your baby.

Sources

• Twilight Sleep-The Embryo Project Encyclopedia
• The Real Story of Twilight Sleep and How it Shaped Obstetrics and Hospital Birth– Supported birth
• Here’s Why Experts Say You Shouldn’t Wash Your Baby After Birth– Woman’s day
• Wait! Don’t Wash That Newborn! -Raising Natural kids
• How did birth move from the home to the hospital, and back again?
• Home births vs Hospital Birth– What to expect
• Birth Center vs. Homebirth: Things to Consider -The Birth Hour