Emboldening Men to Protect and Empower Women at Birth
A birth film for and about men by Janel Mirendah

Blessed be those men who will rise up to create safety for birthing women who nurture us all. – Janel Mirendah

This is such important work. We are in the midst of a terrible trend of over intervention into birth, resulting in trauma and distress. Your films will show the core of the unexpressed pain for parents and for the baby.

Phyllis Klaus, CSW, MFCC
Co-author, “Your Amazing Newborn”

Janel, I watch a lot of birth videos (my wife is a midwife and it seems to be some sort of professional obligation). Recently, I have been horrified by what I see. Watching the previews you’ve had up recently has changed the way… I understand what I am seeing. This is especially true around the parts dealing with “What would it take to make an adult scream like that?” You have changed the way I think about, view, and evaluate births that I see and hear about. My feelings about the birth of my own children has changed. Really, my world has changed.

– Geoff

Coming soon, an interactive website/membership for men and a four-hour educational series that addresses:

conscious birth;  how to protect his family in the hospital and at home;  implores men to be the ones to rise up to demand that the medical establishment to be the ones to stop harming mama-baby and himself; and implores men to create the will to change the structures and protocols, and laws that disempower women bodies to those that will honor women’s bodies, choices, and babies. Men must lead social and political, legislative and hospital policy changes to create science-based, mama-baby/family focused maternity care. Men must demand that caregivers treat his baby and wife/partner with respect and kindness.

Even men educated in birth and prepared for birth can not necessarily protect their partner and child in the medical establishment.  The medical establishment has it’s own culture, one in which men and women enter into, and doing so, they give up their choices and their freedoms. There is no way for a man to be truly prepared to protect his wife and child in that environment.

Men must become engaged in changing the systems that harm women and babies  –  before they conceive their baby or after they’ve experienced the medical model of birth. It’s not likely he can do so during the birth. Nothing prepares a man for the experience of his wife’s disempowerment. Most men do not even feel, think about, or discuss his experience of witnessing the disempowerment of his wife and abuse of the mama and baby

Men, in preparation or with the experience and insight of past violating experiences, can take back their power and protect women, not only for themselves but for those who follow them.

Men can rise up, come together, and lead the effort to create a physiological model of birth. Men can demand true informed consent, support midwifery laws, birth centers, and the demand the adherence of medical establishment to the evidence-based science. Men can address the political and hospital systems and the people who systematically harm babies and women in birth.