Birth Sanctuary
by Shannon Nies
Many women who are others describe the process of giving birth as something that was absolutely horrible. When my mother was pregnant with me, for instance, she went through 19 painful hours of labor (for me?) and after all of that, she had to get a C-section. Not exactly an experience a woman would want to go through again, let alone once.
Fortunately, there is a unique birth center in Los Angeles that gives people the opportunity to have a different kind of experience, from prenatal to postpartum care. This special center, Birth Sanctuary, provides its clients with a more holistic and individualized type of care, for not only pregnant women, but also for their families and even for women who are not yet pregnant.
Recently, I spoke with Aleks Evanguelidi, midwife and co-owner of Birth Sanctuary. She told me about the special services that the Sanctuary offers, and how the center hopes to change modern culture’s view of the birth process, from a traumatic experience to one that is positive, remarkable, and like nothing else in the human experience.
Vision Magazine: Could you please talk about Birth Sanctuary—its history, its purpose?
Aleks Evanguelidi: The reason why my business partner and I were so committed to opening a center is that there just weren’t options in Los Angeles that met the needs of the community. So many people just didn’t want to give birth in the hospital because after Ricki Lake’s movie came out, they started to see the practices that ultimately would lead them to feeling unempowered. But for a lot of people, home birth still felt kind of on the fringe. For us, creating a birth center was kind of that medium ground. Essentially, we wanted to create something beautiful that would be the gold standard in not just birth centers and birth options, but [also in] creating a new type of care that hasn’t really been offered yet.
In countries where statistics are the best, midwives and doctors work together; there’s a collaborative model. But in this country, we don’t do that, which is silly because we’re spending twice the amount of money on every pregnant woman in their prenatal period than any other developed country. We rank about 40th in the world for perinatal, neonatal, or maternal mortality. That’s terrible. We’re basically over-medicalizing birth.
So what our practice has done is, we’ve combined obstetric care and midwifery care, and we’re collaborating together, so we’re actually on the same team. We also bring in all these other models, like acupuncture, chiropractic, cranial sacral, massage therapy. We have medical hypnotists on staff, which is amazing, and marriage and family therapy, lactation support. We have all these things working under one roof, to really support the needs of pregnant women, of families, of husbands, so that the whole care is complete. And they can get it all under one roof with care providers that are experts in the field of pregnancy, or preconception, or postpartum.
When you go to a doctor and you get standard obstetric care, you’re getting a very small slice of the pie. Your average appointment with an obstetrician is 7 minutes long. You’re waiting an hour for that appointment. You spend—real face time with the doctor—actually about 3-4 minutes. And there’s so little care that can be offered in that moment. There’s no relating, there’s no intimacy. Hardly any time to talk about how people are feeling, or what their concerns are, and it’s not built into that model.
With a midwife, you spend an hour, you get to really go into the other issues that are lingering. It’s part therapy, part nutrition, personal coaching. We delve into all those other aspects of the human consciousness, of the human psyche. It’s called the human experience, to be able to unveil some of the fears and concerns and beliefs, so there’s more freedom and more opportunity to be a participant in your experience. We see ourselves as partners in the care versus we’re in control of it or we’re dictating how it’s going to go. It’s very much about individualizing based on uniqueness—what does one person need versus what does another person need.
VM: How did you become interested and involved in more holistic birthing processes?
AE: I was a nutritionalist and an herbalist, but just kept asking the question, what am I supposed to be doing here? How can I best bring my gifts? And I came across a book called “The Red Tent,” and it was so beautiful and set in the biblical period. It’s kind of the feminine perspective from that time period. [After] reading each birth in the book, I was sobbing. It was like, oh my God, if midwifery is still around, this is for me, and I found that it was. But prior to just kind of diving into that education, I became a doula first. I ended up apprenticing at a high-volume birth center in Hollywood. And it was just awesome. Probably about 11 years ago I began that journey.
VM: What is your hope for the future of the Sanctuary?
AE: We really would like more of the Sanctuary to become a more widely accepted model of care. We absolutely see the benefits in the statistics in the care we provide, and we would like to see this model being adopted in other cities and in other places in the country. We’re currently seeking funding for a broader expansion. The other benefit of the model that we’ve created is that it actually produces sustainability for the care providers that function within it.
VM: How do you think modern American culture’s view of how the birthing process should be is changing?
AE: As soon as [women] get pregnant, [they] are starting to educate themselves more, versus, I think in the past, women were just accepting the status quo. You go see your doctor, you get your epidural, maybe you get your C-section, maybe you schedule your C-section. I think there is an awakening amongst individuals, once they start doing the education, that there’s something greater available to them by consciously choosing to be awake and present during this experience. Again, this is not everybody. Most people are still choosing to have drugs at their delivery, but more and more, I think, people are waking up inside of this country. I mean, it’s not just with birth, it’s with everything.
It takes a lot of courage to do that [being present in the birth process] because everything that you’ve seen presented to you by society and in the media is that it’s horrifying. But upon further investigation, when you really look at what’s happening [and] once you’ve gotten past all the media-fed messages and pictures of what birth is, you can tap into something that’s far more mysterious, far more magical, empowering, ultimately the greatest initiation in life’s passage we’re going to experience, which is, the fullness of what it is to be a woman. And it’s incredibly rewarding. There’s nothing like giving birth to your own child. These are unique experiences that, when you consciously, purposefully walk through them without these medications, your life changes forever.For more information about Birth Sanctuary, please visit their Web site, www.birthsanctuary.com. You can also e-mail the Sanctuary at info@birthsanctuary.com or call 310.566.7690.
