ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how childbirth is spiritually experienced and meaningful within society revealing how childbirth has purpose both individually and collectively. The notion of an 'ecology of childbirth' and its implications for how childbirth occurs within contemporary maternity systems is used as a point of departure in the explorations and is not intended to be taken as a fixed and inflexible notion. According to Haeckel ecology is the science of relationship of living things/beings and their environments. The rationale for using hyphens in 'being-at-birth' is to foreground the unifying quality of the phenomenon, thus 'being-at-birth' signals not how people are 'in' the event of birth, but how they 'are' the unfolding events at birth. Birth place is often referred to in terms of physical structures such as home, hospital or birth centre. Conversely the notion of birth space or atmosphere is the feeling dimension of place, an attuned space, a lived-space which is not necessarily connected to physical places.
