Chapter 3, “Psychedelic Birth: The Emergence of the Hippie Midwife,” explores the home birth experience from the perspective of the counterculture. In this context, childbirth became a catalyst to spiritual transcendence. At the same time, new developments in psychiatric research and the proliferation of psychoactive substances created a vibrant, albeit surprising, intellectual exchange between hippies, midwives, and some psychiatrists about the meaning and significance of birth. This chapter exposes the resulting unexpected entanglements between psychedelic psychiatry and spiritual midwifery by focusing on the creation of the longest lasting hippie commune, The Farm. Though The Farm was established in Summertown, Tennessee, its founders traveled from San Francisco to build their utopia and they brought with them intellectual and practical tools gathered from as far away as Communist China and Czechoslovakia. The story illustrates how alternative pathways to mainstream medicine, in both childbirth and psychiatry, came into fruition in the 1970s.
