Birthing with Love

The Sanctum,the home-like collaborative natural birth centre, which is on a mission to make child births normal completes 10 years.

The centre produced "Birthing with Love", a video film capsuling their experience from handling 1000 natural child births in the last one decade.

The world premiere of the film and launch is scheduled on May 5 on the eve of International Day of the Midwife at LV Prasad Film Labs, Road No 2, Banjara Hills at 2pm.

The launch will be followed by a "Panel Discussion"

The film according to Dr Vijaya Krishnan, is aimed to change our understanding of childbirth.

The movie describes a new paradigm in natural birth at The Sanctum Natural Birth Centre.

Dr Vijaya Krishnan says, "The movie raises public awareness about outstanding suitability of professional midwifery in India under the collaborative model of care, which can be easily replicated worldwide."

"The movie follows three couple's experiences, who have very different histories, as they navigate their labour and birth in very different manner."

"Child birth is projected as a crisis, an emergency, a fearful event in one's life. On the contrary, it is the most powerful event in a woman's life.

It is psychological, physical, emotional and spiritual," describes Dr Vijaya Krishnan.

About 'The Sanctum' she says, "It a derivation from the word 'Sanctum Santorum', a Midwife-led Natural Birth Center, where the mother is at the centre of the care universe, not hospital or doctors, and where she is not a prisoner of protocols and unnecessary tests and procedures.

We have helped mothers with complex needs to have natural birth or atleast to have a trial of labour (for example: mothers with high Gestational Diabetes, Pregnancy Induced Hypertension, PCOD etc)."

Dr Vijaya says, "Nature has perfected the mothers' body to give birth for 1000 of years.

Nothing has changed so dramatically that women are now being told that their bodies have suddenly broken, and they have lost the ability to birth babies on their own, naturally, without unnecessary interventions."

"In today's environment most mothers don't have the freedom to birth their babies safely and in a manner they want.

The physiology of labour and birth is the most amazing design of nature— and the mother's body is the manifestation of this design.

And midwives are experts in understanding this physiology of labour and birth, and therefore experts in normal births," she declares.