Children and EEs/EHEs Record Type: Review   ID: 389
Different Doorway: Adventures of a Caesarean Born English, Jane Butterfield
English is a physicist who happens also to be non-labor caesarean born. In working with Stanislav Grof, who has pioneered in understanding the manner in which prenatal experiences and the experience of birth affects one's overall life strategy, she realized that his view of the traditional vaginal birth experience and its role in our lives could not fit her experience. She set out to understand how one's life is influenced by being caesarian born. In Part 1, she discusses "caesarean born" as a conceptual tool. Part 2 consists of excerpts from her journal offering dreams, imagery, and insights into being caesarean born. Part 3 contains interview protocols with other caesarean borns. In Part 4, she views her birth experience and that of other caesarean borns in perspective. She points out that until recently, human birth was synonymous with vaginal birth, but an increasingly large number of persons are now being caesarean born: They don't go down the birth canal. She feels we have "an opportunity to become aware of a deeper level of humanness that transcends both kinds of birth learning, the patterns learned in caesarean birth and the patterns learned in vaginal birth" (p. 136). She writes that she has learned that "my birth played a major part in shaping my concepts of space-identity, separation, who and what I am and of time how I move, change and relate to others. Something as basic as one's experience of space and time deserves to be called a world view. If, as my preliminary sharings with other caesarean-born people indicate, this world view is similar to that of other caesareans, it is meaningful to speak of it as a caesarean world view" (p. 137).
Publisher Information:	Port Reyes Station, CA: Earth Heart, 1985. 143p. Sugg rdg: 140-142; 30 illus

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