AMANI Birth Certified Childbirth Educator & Doula, Sohaib Ali, illuminates some very critical points with his reflections: 

"Deviation from nature and natural ways, sooner or later, leads us to deviate from the right path. Every now and then, Allah places reformers in appropriate places to bring people back to fitrah. As birth culture in the West deviated from nature and took it to the hospitals, Allah placed reformers in their community to spread the warnings about deviating from the natural path. While most of the East is lagging about 150 years behind the West in terms of this 'industrialization' of birth, it is Allah's special blessing that He has sent the reformers for the Muslim world already.

Aisha Al Hajjar is an American midwife who was inspired by natural birth philosophy. She learned the methods for herself after taking childbirth education classes and successfully gave birth naturally to all her eight children, alhamdulillah. She noticed a vacuum of this philosophy in the Muslim world. She soon realized that although various childbirth education programs on the market believed in nature, belief in the Creator and His Word was a major component missing in the majority of what they offered. Being a Muslim, she felt necessary to fill this vacuum by creating her own program that touched the miracles of the Qur'an and guidance from the Sunnah of the Prophet (s), as well as consider culturally sensitive issues of the Middle East, as she distributed her time between different countries. She expanded her research to include other aspects of natural childbirth, as well as from her training as a licensed midwife, thus the AMANI Birth education program was born."

Sohaib then goes on to share his opinion on why is it important for a woman to prepare for her birth:

"The biggest reason why it is important for a woman to prepare for birth in today's developed society, is that it is not 'the norm' to see birthing as a natural life event happening around us. Until the time girls had grown up watching natural births in their homes, they were already prepared for the birth of their children in olden times.

Of course, moving birth to the hospital has not toned down the event from what it is, nothing short of a marathon. In fact, it has only added to the anxiety of potential mothers and introduced more complications. And now that women don't have as much opportunity to witness birth as a natural life event, when the time for their birth experience comes, they have much less, if any, past experience to reflect on. At that time, unprepared mothers were left with no choice but to place their trust in others on how they wish she should run the marathon. She will run the marathon anyway.

This is why, it is important for a woman to prepare for her birth experience, and the duration of nine months during pregnancy should be considered a gift from Allah to prepare themselves fully for the big event that is birth."