Psychedelics &Motherhood: The facts about entheogenic medicine during and after pregnancy

The unnecessary dangers attributed to giving birth in the United States are uncommon in other modernized nations. This is an unfortunate reality relevant to prenatal care as well. Those with concerns may begin to question whether the standardized prenatal approaches are safe and trustworthy, and may explore alternative ways to prepare themselves for pregnancy.

Psychedelic medicines, and the spiritual healing and empowerment they can cultivate, are a powerful way to do just that.

The most common question outside of dosage and what tripping feels like is can psychedelics be used during pregnancy and breastfeeding?

DISCLAIMER

Before continuing, please be advised that this infographic carousel is not suggesting it is safe to use psychedelics while pregnant. Here, we examine certain speculations about how psychedelics may help make conception, pregnancy, and childbirth safer in a country where women’s reproductive health has historically been a means of oppression, in addition to being prohibitively biased according to race and class.

Any discussion of breastfeeding and psychedelics in this context must acknowledge the dramatic differences in worldview between a Western medicalized model on one hand, and a non-Western approach on the other, to pregnancy, breastfeeding, and childrearing. Inindigenous cultures where psychedelics are well-integrated and traditional wisdom has guided people’s actions for generations, exposing babies and children to smaller amounts of the same psychedelic substances utilized by adults in the community is fairly common and acceptable. Most Western medical professionals have neither the worldview nor the knowledge to guide mothers through the process of safer breastfeeding alongside psychedelics use. This is a time where returning to our ancestral practices and employing birth workers is CRUCIAL.