ABSTRACT
Spirituality and healthcare are predominantly focused on end of life care, the central concern of this essay is spirituality at the start of life. Although there is emergent literature gesturing toward spirituality and healthcare (Puchalski et al. 2014, de Souza, Bone, and Watson 2016), there remains a paucity of literature that solely focuses on spirituality at the beginning of life and reproduction (Crowther and Hall 2015, Crowther, Smythe, and Spence 2015, Clark-Callister and Khalaf 2010, Hall 2001, 2016). A systematic review of the literature using a hermeneutic (interpretive) lens found that what literature there is focused on spiritual ‘care’ – the act of doing, whilst the lived-experience of spirituality at birth was often left as a cliché after thought, for example, ‘it was so joyful when the baby arrived’ and ‘it is such a lovely special moment’ (Crowther, Smythe and Spence 2014a). Yet, despite this paucity of published evidence, birth is fundamentally experiential and involves and concerns us all: parents, those planning to be parents, people that do not have or plan to have children and health care professionals involved in maternity (e.g. medical staff, midwives and other allied health care professionals).
