Different Doorway: Adventures of a Cesarean Born

http://www.eheart.com/cesarean/native.html#apples



"The comparison between caesarean birth and vaginal birth can teach us a great deal. Until about 100 years ago the vast majority of people were born vaginally. "Birth" meant "vaginal birth." A metaphor that I use for this is: If the only kind of fruit we knew were apples, we probably wouldn't have two words. We'd have one word that meant "fruit-apple." Then a banana appears, and our sense of what fruit is expands. It becomes more abstract and is not tied to the particulars of either form of fruit, apple or banana. During the whole history of the human race part of being human was the journey down the birth canal. Now, an increasingly large percentage of humans are born caesarean; they don't go down the birth canal. Bananas have joined the apples. 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." -- from Different Doorway, p.136 Tweet