The Global Healing Center points out a number of advantages to natural childbirth. For one, it’s empowering to women to be in charge of their own birth. It also reduces the chances of acquiring an infection at the hospital or receiving an unnecessary episiotomy. The baby is also likely to be healthier because it is born on the woman’s schedule, not that of a doctor rushing to a shift change. Finally, the family saves money — instead of spending up to tens of thousands of dollars in hospital bills for a normal birth, they can save the money and put it toward the child instead.

A literal example of a natural birth is shown in a video of an Australian mother, Simone Surgeoner, who headed to the woods for her fourth delivery. “My dream had long been to give birth in nature,” Surgeoner says in the video. She flew to a friend’s house in the Daintree rainforest in northeast Australia and found a creek that spoke to her with its “pristine pure and the most amazing fresh water I have ever tasted in my life.”
According to the video, Surgeoner started going into labor overnight. Worried that the creek would be too cold, she sets up in an outdoor bathtub instead. By nine in the morning, she hadn’t delivered and decided to move down to her chosen spot in the creek after all.
While the other children played in the stream and along the rocky shore, she lies down on a mat in the creek for the final push. Once the baby crowns, it emerges quickly into the world. By 10:50, Surgeoner is sitting in the stream holding her new baby girl.
“There were some times I didn’t think I could do it,” she says in relief as she cradles her new daughter, sitting in nature and surrounded by her family.
“It was the singular most transforming event of my life,” she writes in the video description, “and my most conscious act as a woman to date.”