Recently I had the great pleasure of interviewing the legendary midwife, Ina May Gaskin after she wrote the new and very well-received, Birth Matters: A Midwife’s Manifesta. The book is published by Seven Stories Press and is available here.
I have given birth twice in my life and I will come clean and admit that I am not one of nature’s ‘birth lovers’. My first baby was born in a birth centre and my second was born in a mainstream hospital. Both babies were vaginal births, the first a ‘no intervention style birth’ (but a long, painful, posterior labour) and the second birth an epidural birth. They were pretty successful births, all things considered – my babies were alive and well and I recovered quite quickly, but in both cases I had a lot of fear to overcome and I did not quite make it in my quest to put that fear aside. However, to this day I remain awestruck by the process of birth and my own incredible encounters with that.
Birth Matters is a profoundly encouraging book arguing a way forward for reconciling our modern lives with the act of birth. At its core, Birth Matters recognises that birthing is a feminist issue. In interviewing Ina May Gaskin I asked her all the difficult questions that had been bubbling around in my head since my own birth experiences and I am delighted to say that she was very generous, and not unexpectedly, quite fearless in taking my questions on…
blue milk: I saw your interview on a big feminist site recently and the discussion was quickly bogged down in the comments section by a very heated discussion along old lines around the debate about the obstetrics versus midwifery models of birth. Although many of us, as feminists, are natural allies to you, do you feel like feminism still doesn’t understand what you’re trying to do in some ways?
Ina May Gaskin: I feel this very strongly and have since the mid-1970s, when it became clear to me that becoming a mother was viewed by most prominent feminists as an “anti-feminist” course to take. Those who did become mothers were told that they could do it all, but their true needs were seen as detrimental to the branch of the women’s movement that was emphasizing the need for women to get out of the house and into the workplace.
I found it odd that the one creative act that no man could ever do, was put down and written about in disgusting terms by feminist writers such as Simone de Beauvoir and Shulamith Firestone (who gained far more attention from other feminists than those writers such as Barbara Katz Rothman and Gena Corea, who wrote cogently and intelligently about birth issues). I think this led de Beauvoir and Firestone, among others, into philosophical nonsense that led to a great deal of confusion and poor policy. This is probably one big reason that we have ‘one-size-fits-all’ birth care policy and virtually no regulation of assisted reproductive technologies in the US (no laws, no rules against the implantation of multiple embryos even though these involve great risks to the health of the mother).
blue milk: A big part of the modern birth experience for women is fear, it is the way we portray birth in film and on TV, it is the way we pitch public health messages to women about pregnancy, and it was certainly a big part of my experience of birth (both times) in spite of efforts on my part to overcome that by going to a birth centre instead of a mainstream hospital. Your philosophy, in many ways, is trying to redress that isn’t it? To overcome ‘fear’ as the dominant message for women about birth?
Ina May Gaskin: You’re right. The women I selected to be work as midwives with me and I were able to establish a birth culture in our small community that minimized fear and was, for at least a decade, isolated from the fear that could have been imported via television, films, and the worries coming from anxious relatives. We were successful enough in the beginning years of our practice that the evidence then spoke for itself.
This is why I like to send women to watch other mammals give birth—to see what it’s like when a female moves freely and feels what is happening, without being afraid. YouTube is good for this, especially for: “the dramatic struggle for life” (an elephant giving birth and reviving her baby who isn’t breathing in an animal park) and “chimp birth Attica zoo” for a creative way to save the perineum during crowning and birth.
blue milk: Many women my age are sceptical of anything seen as ‘spiritual’ – I think I was among them, and we were shocked to discover that we were capable of strong feelings about low intervention birth once we became pregnant because we were so certain that we were not hippies and that low intervention births are ‘hippy stuff’. Is the birth movement doing enough to reach women like me – Birth Matters is certainly impressively broad in its pitch – or should women like me ‘get over’ this aversion to spirituality (an aversion, which at its core is surely a little misogynist)?
Ina May Gaskin: I’ve long been aware of your generation’s aversion to ‘hippy stuff’, which is why I chose the bland-looking cover of Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth. That was one of my ways of reaching out, and I tried to do that with language, too. I agree with you that a reflexive aversion to spirituality is misogynist. I was amazed that women who wanted to be strong were willing to so blindly trust a medical profession that had so thoroughly destroyed, discredited or marginalized midwives for no reason (in the US) other than to claim that field of activity for itself. US obstetricians in the early 20th century realized that they didn’t know much, because women preferred midwives. Because they wanted to know what midwives knew, they decided to discredit midwives and make them illegal so they could use poor women as teaching material.
We should also recognize the reality of how mysterious birth is and how many different ways it may be perceived. We need to understand the main historical developments of midwifery and medicine if we want to grasp how important it is to find some balance between midwifery and medicine as we go forward.
blue milk: It is difficult for any movement to be both the activists and the advocates – sometimes these goals will be in conflict. For instance, I think it is a problem for the pro-choice movement in feminism to properly acknowledge the feelings of the small minority of women for whom abortion is a traumatic or regretful decision, and I wonder if you think there has been a similar problem for midwives, as well?
Ina May Gaskin: I agree with your take on how the pro-choice movement carried on in a way that allowed a backlash to develop, and I have to say that I saw that coming. When it comes to midwives, though, I think our problems in understanding what has destroyed or weakened women’s confidence in their ability to give birth go much deeper than the pro-choice movement’s lack of acknowledgement that some women regret abortions they’ve had.
Dutch obstetrics from 18th century forward found a way to exist in balance with Dutch midwifery through the 20th century in a way that was an example to the world. It’s a shame that the US model of maternity care was the one that the rest of the industrialized world imitated instead of the Dutch model.
From my perspective, it’s pretty easy to see how much the rest of the world has imitated US obstetrics, apparently unaware of the ignorance of women’s bodies upon which this model of obstetric care was constructed. Australia, for instance, imitated the UK during the early 20th century, by keeping midwifery (but a midwifery that accepted the dominance of medicine). Midwives had a certain amount of autonomy until the move came to make every birth take place in hospital. When a few women rebelled during the 1970s against the lack of choice this meant for them and started Australia’s home birth movement, organized medicine’s attack on home birth practitioners was swift and savage, with the de-registration of Dr. John Stevenson, the family physician who stood behind some of those first home birth midwives. According to what I’ve been told by countless Australian moms and midwives is that it has gone pretty much downhill since then.
I don’t know enough about the history of birth in Australia to know if there was anything close to a 67% forceps rate during the 1950s or 1960s, as there was in the US. This was a product of how ignorant US obstetrics got after half a century of there being no midwives. That 67% forceps rate went with a c-section rate of 5%, by the way, but when the late 1970s brought along a new generation of women demanding midwives, and along with that, the electronic fetal monitor and the epidural, forceps were quickly outmoded and replaced by a suddenly increased tolerance for cesarean section.
What further confused the picture was that during this period, the US reported maternal death rates that were not very different from the levels reported by other countries. The trouble was that the US figures were and still are much less accurate, because the US has never had a real health care system with consistent methods of reporting and reviewing maternal deaths—something I wasn’t able to unearth until 1999.
When medicine rules or obliterates midwifery, it becomes difficult for women to understand the power that midwifery could have if it were once again a profession whose power equaled that of the obstetric profession.
blue milk: But in an individual birth experience, sometimes the politics of the birth debate, which is such high stakes now, means that a woman’s desires are potentially in competition with both the obstetrician’s and the midwife’s interests, would you agree or not?
Ina May Gaskin: To begin with, women may easily desire the impossible—that every baby can survive if we apply enough technology and expensive medication. Too many have been seduced into thinking this is true. Women have been infantilized to a great degree, another factor that hasn’t helped. We can’t count how many women fell for the line that their sex lives would be enhanced by having a cesarean instead of a vaginal birth on the grounds that the vagina through which a baby has passed has been stretched out and ruined. I just spoke this morning with an Israeli woman who had a c-section for her full gestation twins 9 years ago and still grieves about the loss of the body she once had. Her figure is beautiful—that’s not the problem. But lovemaking has been painful for her ever since the surgery, and no surgeon can tell her why or fix her. And she knows that her surgery wasn’t an emergency but more a product of her doctor’s discomfort with the possibility that her second twin might be breech.
It would be good if we could get women, midwives, and obstetricians all to agree that it is not good for midwives or obstetricians to lack the knowledge and skills that were once considered essential to both professions. Skills that are being lost already at a rapid rate include: the ability to diagnose a false pregnancy before a cesarean is performed, the ability to safely assist vaginal birth of breech babies or multiple gestation babies, and manual palpitation and pelvimetry. I could go on, but you get the idea.
blue milk: I love that you see fathers as the great untapped resource in the movement towards kinder, gentler births. Can you expand upon your thinking here?
Ina May Gaskin: Fathers really have a strong instinct to protect their partners during pregnancy and especially during labor. Lots of men have told me that my chapter on ‘sphincter law’ in the Guide to Childbirth is what helped them understand what helps and doesn’t help their partners during labor. It also helps them to know that women’s genitals have the spectacular ability to swell and expand temporarily during the birth process and then to go back to their formerly small size without being ruined, in similar fashion to what happens during a male erection. Knowing that it is the blood flow to the appropriate organs that is needed and that this can happen only when the laboring mother is not kept from getting into the good birth trance empowers her partner to help create the conditions that help her get there.
blue milk: For people who don’t understand why birth continues to be such a hot button issue, can you explain to them, in a nutshell, why it is important that women have choice about the way they birth and why so many people want to control that decision?
Ina May Gaskin: It was an enterprising US obstetrician in the early 19th century who got the idea that medical men could entirely take over maternity care from women if they just became fear merchants instead of caring physicians or scientists. Never mind producing any evidence, he said in many more words than I just used in paraphrasing him—just scare them. That’s easier and very effective. That was Dr. Hugh Hodge, and he was right. Now we have to recognize how much harm has come and spread globally from his selfish advice, and we can then start a world-wide movement to dispel this fear and reverse the damage that has been done. I’m excited about what we can do with this now that it has become possible to piece together the long story of how fear came to dominate birth in our species.
Once fear becomes the norm, it becomes possible for a lot of profit to be made from the materials, medicines, delivery systems, advertising, conferences, and so on that pertain to high-tech maternity care as the norm. More profit is made when the number of people involved in care is diminished (especially in the US, where health insurance is so expensive). This means that fear, ignorance, and greed are interwoven and tend to cycle to ever higher levels that have already reached madness in countries where caesarean rates exceed 50% (China, for instance). Midwifery knowledge can disappear in a remarkably short time (10-20 years), to the point that women can no longer imagine what it might be like to have a midwife. (I know this, because I was that woman when I was pregnant and giving birth to my first). This is how you get a mass of infantilized women who may put up with dangerous and uncomfortable practices for a couple of generations before they get enough gumption to put things right. This is what a growing number of us are working on now in the US!
Many thanks for this opportunity.
blue milk: Thank you for the very thought-provoking responses.
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I am very much interested in your own response to this interview as a reader, but please, let’s not get overly side-tracked by old arguments that have been more than thrashed out in other forums. I would really like the discussion to move on to some of the more interesting and challenging directions that Ina May Gaskin’s thoughts have taken us.
I just want to say a big thank you for conducting and transcribing (phew!) such a valuable, important interview. It is deeply appreciated by this Ina-May devotee reader of yours. And I didn’t realize there were so many other women like me, surprised to discover their instincts falling in line with what’s normally associated with “hippy stuff”. The natural birth movement definitely needs an image makeover!
I think the pro-choice movement could have an easy alignment with the birth advocacy movement (I dislike the term natural birth). In fact, when I was at my first Medical Students for Choice annual meeting, the keynote speaker mentioned choice of site of birth as a priority. Reproductive rights are a spectrum, and the center of the movement presumably is the autonomy and rights of the woman as a human being, a patient and as a being capable of pregnancy and birth.
I think I agree with this. I am always angered by “natural birth” advocates because the picture I get from them is so black and white: birth in a hospital and you’ll be abused, give birth at home/in a birthing center with a midwife and a doula and you’ll have an ORGASMIC BIRTH! My own experience of home birth was significantly less than orgasmic. I was raped by my midwife, aquired PTSD and tokophobia and would not have ever been able to even consider having another child if I hadn’t found a wonderful doctor who allowed me to have a truly dreamy, wonderful, empowering planned c-section. Interventions are not the enemy. Assholes who abuse laboring women are the ones we need to be going after.
Dang, sorry about the HTML fail. Feel free to fix it if you can. Still getting used to my tablet.
Great post! (I admit I’ve been a skulking lurker, reading your blog in my RSS feed for months without commenting. So hi!)
I wanted to comment on the issue of fear around pregnancy & birth. I read Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth, I think it was, when I was pregnant with my son. I’d suffered a late miscarriage during my first pregnancy (18 weeks) so I needed the reassurance I got from all the stories in that book of women having babies without intervention. I needed the kind of care I got from my midwives that normalized the pregnancy & birth experience, rather than treating me as though I was a sick patient. I needed the education & support I got from my prenatal classes, which were taught by a very experienced, down-to-earth doula from the Childbearing Society. All that helped keep the fear at bay.
Though I’d had such a horrible, painful experience losing my first baby, my experience birthing my son was amazing. I won’t say it was painless, but the pain was absolutely manageable partly because I knew it was *normal* & even useful so I was not afraid. When I gave birth to my son, I had the support of my partner, my doula, my midwife & a nurse who all helped me focus inwardly & get on with the work of birthing, without fear. 🙂 I remember my midwife repeating “You’re safe, you’re safe, you’re safe.” during the two hours of pushing.
My experience makes me wonder: if women could escape the fear (through prenatal education, more choice around care providers & birth environment, etc) could more of us have a positive experience like I did? How much of an impact would this have on C-section rates or even just interventions like epidurals & inductions?
I too have been lurking! And I absolutely agree re: fear. I was lucky enough to have a childhood friend who was finished her midwifery degree as I was pregnant, and we had the good fortune to get into the caseload program at The Royal Women’s – both of which meant that fear was pretty much not an issue for me during labour. (We also did this course – http://www.birthingwisdom.com.au/birth_preparation.html – Rhea is Australia’s Ina May!)
We are lucky in this country that there are still midwives in hospitals, and that caseload programs (where women meet the same midwife each visit, and she is the one who also attends the birth, and visits them at home afterwards as well) are available to those who choose this path.
There is still a long way to go before the collective consiousness around birth reaches a mainstream middle ground (between the ideas of wafty hippy love-ins and terrifying agony), but – in contrast to Ina May’s conversations with Australian women – In my experience, I think we’re getting there.
The first time I heard the idea that the medicalisation of childbirth was a kind of patriarchal conspiracy, I scoffed. Perhaps it’s a mark of how far I’ve come as a feminist, or perhaps its just the wisdom of age but now I think ‘of course it is’. Birthing has become another way to divide women.
This is interesting. I don’t completely agree with her views. I agree that the US is way too hospital/medical-centric. However, I disagree that this means all women should go the midwife/birth center route and it’s simply an issue of fear. I personally liked being in a hospital. I grew up in the Netherlands but have been living in the US for some time now and gave birth in the US. I did my research. And I felt more comfortable being in a hospital, both times. The first time I had an obstetrician and the second time I had a midwife. Both times my labor was fairly long, especially the first time, and I was glad that I could make the choice – my own informed choice – to have an epidural. Because as my mother put it after I had been in labor for 26 hours the first time and hadn’t slept in three days and two nights, “who are you trying to impress here? Stop trying to be a hero and take care of yourself and that baby first.” In my case, an epidural was the right decision, and I was glad that wasn’t judged or argued with. It had nothing to do with fear, I was just taking care of myself and doing what worked for me. If I have another baby, I’d do the same thing again: see how far I can get until my body and mind are too tired to manage any more, and if I still have a while to go, get an epidural.
I just finished reading birth matters and as a result I’m not feeling scared about the birth anymore and I want to try it without drugs!
I got an obstetrician in case it turns out I need an emergency c-section, but he is very easy going and by all accounts will let me do whatever I want when the time comes.
This is a great post – yet again Blue Milk. In a world where children/babies and paid work are kept very separate, I think the support network for women pregnant with their first child is absent for many women. This creates a space, a gap, where the medicalised model of childbirth and the relentless ‘advice’ to pregnant women on things they must not do (which becomes like a cage and reinforces the notion of woman as receptacle, as a womb not an autonomous person) becomes particularly powerful.
I had my first child in London. I was a kiwi, a professional working woman who knew not one single soul who wasn’t at work during the day, Monday to Friday. Afterwards, I created a network of friends and support with the help of mothers I had met through NCT. I was back in New Zealand for my second child. I knew what I needed that time and had built a network of friends before I had my daughter. Easier second time around because I wasn’t in full time paid work.
I have met women who never held a baby in their lives before they held their own. Those women have gone on to become wonderful, competent mothers. But it is surely an unlikely thing to give birth so distant from experiences of babies (let alone birth) when we look across time and cultures?
Caseload midwifery is a fabulous ideal, as are birth centres, but in my city the one option for this is booked out so fast you have to book in the day you find you are pregnant, and even then you go straight to the waiting list.
Yet they continually list this centre as ‘providing choice’ for birth in our area. For a very select few maybe.
The rest of us are stuck in a medicalised hospital setting with any random midwife. Out of 3 births/midwives only one was nice to me.
Birth is such a major major thing, both emotionally and physically. I would like a bit more care and compassion around the process.
I loved this post. I’m not a mother, and I don’t know if I’ll ever become one, but I shamelessly read wonderful blogs about motherhood and feminism which also talk about birthing, and pregnancy because I’m still part of my community, where women become mothers even if I never become one. I want to support and be conscious of issues – and if I’m in the position of pregnancy at some point, how I might feel about negotiating it for myself. I found this really valuable.
I think that it is a shame that there is such hostility levelled at women or practices about being ‘hippy’ like, I think that some kind of negative image persists and obscures what I’ve generally experienced as just as thoughtful and rational as people who don’t identify that way, some with a strong spirituality and some without.
But also, there is such a conflation of spirituality with religion that it divides people so quickly and so forcefully, and I think unnecessarily. It can be possible to be spiritual, to be a hippy and still consider things scientifically – there’s of course no guarantee that this is the case but… it seems that there’s a hostility towards those who do speak of intuition, from feeling and using that as part of their rationale for doing things, toward those who focus on things that come more from the natural world and with less processing than highly manufactured baby-industry things are. As with anything there are people and beliefs that don’t mesh, and it’s reasonable to question things that don’t work for you… but maybe there is also an opportunity here.
To recognise that birthing is about choice – choice that empowers a woman to have information and support for her choices around birth without fear or judgement. There is as much place for technology an assisted birth as there is for non/low intervention births, depending on circumstances and choices. But overall I would agree that the scaremongering toward women has to end and that at it’s core is part of the work of feminism.
I identify as some kind of hippy-woman, but I’m also a geek who is a communication-phile, in love with my technology. And with my right to choose my life.
It doesn’t really make sense to me to draw a broad brush over a bunch of women and thinking, label it ‘hippy’ and not consider that there may be things with merit and also things that don’t gel – same as for any other cultural identification/association that we take on or have foisted upon us.
Thank you for the work in transcribing – it was a wonderful interview and I’m glad you got to ask the questions and (hopefully) have them resolved for you.
I love this interview! Thank you so much! My mother had me at home, with a midwife, but my mother-in-law reacted to this idea by saying, “What if you bleed to death? I almost bled to death giving birth!” And I asked, “Why, though? What happened?” “The forceps pierced my cervix, and they couldn’t stop the bleeding.” Even after I pointed out that this would never happen at a home birth with a midwife who does not own forceps, she’s still terrified of the idea. I’ll be giving birth in a hospital in the fall, reluctantly, but I made sure that the midwives I’m working with had a low c-section rate (8%) and have the authority to keep the traffic in and out of the room to a minimum. I’m so relieved to be in their care. The hospital itself does not have such a great record, but this midwifery group is incredible. My GYN recommended them because “they look for what is normal, while an OB will look for whatever might go wrong.” I know that it’s a backwards system when women are now often better-educated about birth than obstetricians!
PS I’m not reluctantly giving birth, just reluctantly going to the hospital to do it! 😉
This is an amazing interview. Thank you, Blue Milk! I think I will go look up Ina May Gaskin’s books.
Thanks so much for this interview. I love your thoughtful questions and her ever-informed and opinionated responses.
I had my first baby in a hospital with a midwife. Loved the prenatal care that I received in a non-hospital setting, as I’m one who doesn’t believe that pregnancy is an illness. I thought I was going to have the best of both worlds with a midwife by my side, but in a hospital room with lots of technology right outside the door, just in case. And while I delivered a healthy baby with little tearing, I had tons of interventions. It was the classic case of “not progressing”. I had my waters broken. Then Pitocin. Then more. My boy was stress free the whole time, my body was just taking it slow. Then the hours of pushing, then the OB called in for suction. Not the “natural” experience I was hoping for.
I don’t blame those in obstetrics. I blame the insurance industry (I live in the US). As soon as you check into the hospital, you are on the clock. And how will everyone make more money, than if lots of “procedures” have to be performed? I would like to hear Ina’s and your take on that issue.
Both my sister and close friend had lovely home births. And yes, there was pain, but both came away empowered, not infantalized (I like her use of this term). I am pregnant now, and just switched over to a home birth midwife. I still feel like I have the best of both worlds, though – I live 7 minutes from that same hospital.
And insurance companies generally won’t pay for a home birth. How’s that for choice?
I’m conflicted by this issue. I understand that the medicalisation of pregnancy and birth is disempowering for women, but as with all things to do with feminism, it is also about choice, and making that choice freely available, without feeling guilty about it. I own a couple of Ina May’s books, which rocked my world, but sometimes need to be taken with a pinch of salt. Some of the birth stories report women not being allowed to complain about pain etc. Also, I think the smugness of authors such as Sarah J Buckley does nothing to empower women, and everything to make them feel inadequate if they so much as consider intervention of any kind. It is the most awesome, hard core trip I have ever taken, but in the end birth is birth, all you want at the end is a healthy baby and healthy mama, without the implied competition that seems to go on among some women…length of labour, choice of treatment option (private/public), interventions, etc. I think the key here is to ensure women are educated to make their own decisions, and be at peace with that.
I’m interested in your insight that an aversion to spirituality is a bit misogynist; it relates to a paragraph in Birth Matters that stood out for me and that I critiqued when I reviewed the book last fall.
After my most recent pregnancy (my second and in all probability my last pregnancy), I have to revise the conclusions I came to in that review. Speaking of “a woman’s desires [as] potentially in competition with both the obstetrician’s and the midwife’s interests,” God forbid that a complication should arise, as happened in the 31st or 32nd week of my pregnancy. Suddenly, I felt I was a target for all kinds of unwanted interventions — many of which were also unnecessary for the condition that had earned me (really, the fetus) the “high risk” label. In the end, the labor and delivery went more or less as I wanted, but it was a near miss. And I’m still pretty upset about the whole thing, mainly because that “high risk” label seemed (at times) to make my own desires entirely irrelevant to my care givers, rather than as one of many factors to consider (alongside my baby’s condition) in putting together a birth plan.
Blue Milk, I have been reading your blog for over a year and this is my first comment. I love your blog! I am really confused over your statement that you think that being adverse to spirituality is misogynistic, though. From my perspective it seems that most religions have done a great deal of harm to women, and that disliking those beliefs that harm women is a step away from misogyny. I also understand that some pagan, earth-based religions view women as goddesslike and special and worthy of worship. I am not sure that putting women on a supernatural pedestal, and suggesting that we are magical beings (which buys into stereotypes about women being guided entirely by emotion and irrational processes rather than being capable of thinking “like a man”), is helpful to women, either. I am really interested in your perspective on this!
Lastly, I hope that you read my question in the spirit it was intended; I wish to have a respectful dialogue on this and I am not trying to hurt anyone with my words. I would love to hear any differing views, but if you disagree with me please tell me why so that I can better understand your viewpoint.
I think many people see a big distinction between spirituality and religion. Every birth experience is different, for some it seems to be a wonderful, uplifting, connecting experience. I read somewhere during my first pregnancy that to birth naturally successfully you have to connect with your “inner monkey,” ie, tune in to your innate instincts and reach a part of yourself that transcends conscious, rational thought. I did not have that experience in either of my births. They were profound learning experiences, though. Mainly, I learned that I am not even a tiny bit spiritual or religious myself and have no interest in ever encountering any inner monkies! That moment of transcendence and seeing one’s self as part of a holistic, natural, universal rhythm seems to be where the spiritual element is most recognizable in births. Obviously I’m just relating what I’ve read, though. Maybe someone who is a bit less squeamish can flesh this out better. 🙂
Ina May is the one who says to connect with your inner monkey 🙂 And actually for me that was one of the lines that have stayed with me and helped me so much to prepare for and get through my drug-free labour. It’s funny though, I didn’t connect that as especially spiritual. For me it really helped me understand how to shut myself off from potentially disturbing outside stimuli and self-consciousness and concentrate on my birthing body.
Haha, it’s a line that sticks with you! Vivid imagery. My own birthing body sent a postcard after the event that said, “Told you you should’ve adopted!”
Sorry to double post, but I re-read my comment and I realized I should clarify one point. I don’t think that rational thinking or logic are actually “thinking like a man”, I was talking about stereotypes. I know that women are very capable of logical thought (and I think we should celebrate that). I was saying that stereotypes to the contrary are harmful to women (especially if you want to work in a field that is currently male dominated like math or technology!). I don’t believe that there is a “male way of thinking” and a “female way of thinking”, and I think that saying there is undermines women (and excludes people who are intersex or don’t fit into the gender binary). It’s just another gender-role box that if you don’t fit into people say you’re broken or refuse to respect you. And if you do fit into it maybe it’s okay, but maybe it starts to feel oppressive and limiting.
I’ll respond to this shortly, it’s a good question and I am happy to clarify.
Thanks for responding to my comment! I am very interested in hearing your thoughts.
Chris, finally, sorry. I think denegrating anything ‘spiritual’ just because it is ‘spiritual’ is a little misogynist because we tend to associate scientific thinking with men and intuition with women and we tend to see spiritual as intuitive/emotional/woo stuff as being so ‘less than’ scientific thought. That’s not to say that there isn’t a time and a place for scientific thinking and personally when it comes to things medical I am way more in the scientific camp.. but that’s also not to say that there isn’t a time and a place for and value in spiritual thinking. Just because I’m not particularly spiritual doesn’t mean that spirituality isn’t important to some people and I can see that my rejection of their spirituality comes from a place that is close to internalised misogyny. .
Thanks for the interview- I had never connected fear of childbirth, and the infantilazion of women before, but it makes perfect sense to me. Like so many medical issues, I think medical proffesionals want to deal with someone who doesn’t know anything about their own condition, as opposed to someone who is informed and able to question their decisions.
I think that fear about childbirth (fueled by ignorance about what is actually going on with your body) is a block to being able to make the decisions that will keep you comfortable with whatever kind of pregnancy you want. Reading Ina May’s books kept me informed so that I didn’t freak out during my induced-but no epidural labour- That’s very valuable information to have because it calms you and makes the experience familiar. Also it helps to make you feel as though you do have an active role in childbirth- it’s not just something that’s happening to you, it’s something your body is doing.
I agree that we have a problem with fear and the perception of childbirth, evident to me in the women who profess an outright preference for a cesarean over a vaginal delivery because they find it less frightening.
However I don’t think that the story of fear and birth is that simple. I think we need to remember that for most of history and in many places today, women face a genuine risk of death or medical complications when they give birth. I’m not going to haul up African maternal death statistics – we all know them.
It is important to remember that in the West, most women have access to the contraception, family planning and medical care which ensure they have the babies they want, when they want, safely (in most cases). I suggest that lack of fear is a privilege.
I would like to add that I emphatically agree with the importance of midwifery, and women’s empowerment and choice in labour. Fear is not a good thing, but it is, perhaps, a rational thing.
I agree that lack of fear is a privilege, but from an outsider’s point of view, it would seem that this privilege is not something that a lot women in the US actually have – the idea of ‘normal physiological childbirth’ is not part of the majority of women’s experiences. Maternal death statistics in the US are staggeringly, tragically high (where they are recorded at all), and I guess it is Ina May & co’s opinion that ‘rational’ fear on this level is a product of the system that causes so many poor outcomes.
I agree. What struck me about Ina May’s comments was that the very people who should able to help reduce fear around birth, were rather promoting it. Although I cannot really comment on the US system, I gather it also has serious issues around access to appropriate medical care, including midwives.
This discussion is fascinating. I’ve had my two babies in New Zealand, which has a state funded private midwife system parallel to the hospital system. If you have a private midwife you can birth at home or in a birthing centre if your city has one or in a hospital. I don’t know the details but the journey in NZ back to having midwives as primary carers after a monopoly by GPs was a long a tortuous one, and there are still many issues. One problem is a shortage of midwives!
I found having private midwives was fantastic and I didn’t feel much fear. I also found our publicly funded ante-natal course was really helpful and practical.
The first birth was painful and we ended up at the hospital where I chose to have an epidural (didn’t enjoy that much). So I was actually more fearful before the 2nd birth, since I knew what I was in for! In the event, that one went quickly and fairly easily. I did end up with an episiotomy both times, I think I have trouble breaking through the mental block and pushing hard enough! Perhaps I should have read some natural childbirth books!
My mother was terrified of me giving birth and recommended a C-section! She had a terrible first birth with my brother in the Soviet system, which seemed to involve being kept in a room with other terrified birthing mothers and no support people or pain relief allowed. For my birth she unsurprisingly chose twilight sleep. So being at both my births was brave of her and I think wonderful for her to see how low intervention birth can go well.
Anyway, I really appreciate the choices we have here in NZ and feel that we have a good balance. I wish women in other places had this too.
Thank you for this discussion, it’s great to see one on birthing choices that does not descend into the kind of squabbling we sometimes see…
One thing I think is very interesting when we are talking about feminism with regard to different models of prenatal and labour care is the language that is often used. I was shocked to read in mainstream pregnancy books advice that your doctor may ‘allow’ you to labour in a way you choose, make decisions about interventions, even have sex after the baby is born! This kind of permission-based discourse is also frequently used by women talking about their own health care in this context.
For me, this is reminiscent of the time when women needed men to ‘allow’ them to get a bank loan, a job, a hysterectomy…
While the ‘natural childbirth movement’ (I too have some issues with the term) can certainly be judgmental at times, I don’t believe it is guilty to the same extent of placing choices that should belong to women themselves in the hands of (more often than not) male doctors and a system that was certainly instituted by men.
I totally agree on your point about how we describe birth in terms of the (male) doctors ‘allowing’ us to do this or that. When I chose to give birth at home, people were actually amazed that my husband (!) and my doctors allowed me to do so…
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