Pregnancy and Childbirth in Tibet: Knowledge, Perspectives, and Practices Sienna R. Craig To Tibetans life does not begin at birth, but rather at conception. After death, a being’s consciousness... wanders in an intermediate realm until impelled by the forces of its own karma to enter a womb at the instant of conception. Gestation is a hazardous time when women try to consume foods and seek spiritual means to prevent any harm coming to their growing baby. Once born, the child must fight for survival against daunting odds. Infancy is fraught with more hazards than any other stage of the life course, and the infant mortality rate in Nubri is frightfully high. Nearly one in every four children born alive does not live to see his or her first birthday. (Childs 2004: 38) As far as childbirth is concerned, we note that scientific medicine claims parturition as one of its legitimate domains. It is no surprise, therefore, that wherever scientific medicine is instituted, childbearing becomes absorbed into the medical domain. This amounts to a redefinition of birth as a medical event. (Jordan 1978: 76) Pregnancy and childbirth in Tibetan communities presents as a series of paradoxes. On the one hand, the creation and bringing forth of new life is deeply valued and rooted in Tibetans’ religious and ethical beliefs about the nature of existence, par- ticularly the gift of being reborn as a human being and the possibility for spiri- tual achievement this might engender. On the other hand, pregnancy and birth are intensely vulnerable times. The high maternal and infant mortality rates in cultur- ally Tibetan communities serve as painful, embodied reminders of the Buddhist First Noble Truth, the truth of suffering (Skt. Dukkha). Indeed, within culturally Tibetan communities, birth is part of the larger cycle of death and rebirth that Bud- dhists call samsara, cyclic existence. It is also commonplace: something that hap- pens between harvest and threshing, or as people move from high summer pastures to winter dwellings. Yet pregnancy and birth also precipitate much pain, fear, and loss. In many parts of the Tibetan Plateau, for a mother to survive a complicated delivery, or, as Geoff Childs points out above, for a child to live past age one, is to beat the odds. S.R. Craig (B ) Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA e-mail: sienna.craig@dartmouth.edu 145 H. Selin (ed.), Childbirth Across Cultures, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science 5, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-2599-9_13, C  Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009