I would love to get in my church and teach the young girls about the beauty of birth. Sadly, my attempts to do so have been met with resistance, because the leaders are worried the parents will be bothered by it. 🙁
I was going to wait to post this link until I could say… YES, I have done this. But apparantly moms worry that if I talk to their teenagers about how beautiful birth can be than they will of course get pregnant right away and have a baby.
I love the church, but man, there are definitely some people in it with some odd ideas about anything having to do with sexuality. My MIL wouldn’t let my SIL with endometriosis get on the pill as a teenager for her cramps, because that would mean she would go out and have sex. *eyerolls*
And that, my dear, is why our girls are in the situations/problems they are in right now… incomplete sex education from the WRONG sources (worldly sex ed classes, friends, peers, boyfriends, the media, etc…) *sigh*
I’m sad to hear that your excellent idea has met with resistance, because I completely agree with what you’d like to do! I hope and trust you’ll keep looking for opportunities to help young people (and I think both girls/women AND boys/men are deeply wounded by our culture’s messages regarding childbirth) see birth in a more accurate and fulfilling light.
I’m also interested to hear you mention that you’d like to see positive messages about birth in college curricula. I’m a recent Ph.D. in English and am also currently training as a birth doula, and I’ve been toying with a scholarly project about narrative representations of birth while also trying to figure out how to incorporate healthy views of birth and breastfeeding (which most young people seem to find totally icky) into various sorts of courses.
I think we’re on the right track, for what it’s worth!