I have an article up at Essential Baby – “In Defence of the Mothers You Hate”.
However, there’s one mother for whom we reserve a special place at the Table of Hatred, and she is the ‘militant mother’. A woman proud of her intervention-free birth makes us feel … what? Guilty, less-than, unwomanly, judged? One thing I know for sure: the militant mother makes us angry. She was recently derided by Mamamia’s Mia Freedman as a “birthzilla”, someone who cares about her birth more than her baby. Except Freedman set the benchmark curiously low for a militant mother; she was anyone with a birth plan. Consequently, a whole bunch of us were forced to consider ourselves “birthzillas” and wonder whether other militant mothers were similarly misunderstood.
The militant mother feels strongly about what happens to her body during birth – and to her baby’s – and she wants women to know about their options. She’s also readily marginalised by powerful institutions. In pro-choice circles we otherwise call the women fighting for rights like these ‘activists’. As a feminist, it concerns me that we’re so intolerant towards birth activism when abortion activism is core to our understanding of bodily autonomy. The activist mother’s beliefs are dismissed as inflexibility, but I’ve had just as many mothers recommend an epidural to me as I’ve had women recommend drug-free births, and they all did so with equal enthusiasm.
blue milk 
Thanks for this! It’s been really hard for me to believe in the good will–as far as feminism is concerned–of anyone who does not see that a woman’s right to choose applies to giving birth just as much as it does to having sex or having an abortion. So much distrust of women’s bodies, women’s control, women’s desire!
I am completely, totally, absolutely on-board with women having birth any way and any how they choose to. Really. But an example of what rubs me the wrong way about birth activism is in the quote you posted: “A woman proud of her intervention-free birth..” I don’t see what there is to be proud of in an intervention-free birth, unless you also somehow feel that a birth with interventions is somehow less worthy than an intervention-free birth. Giving birth should not be a contest of how few painkillers you use, whether you use an epidural or not, or how old-school you able to go. I am glad to know there are options out there, but I still feel that some of these options are pushed more vigorously by birth activists than others.
Why not feel proud of a challenging physical achievement? You can feel and express that pride without disdaining anyone else. People absolutely do have the right to feel proud of running a marathon, completing a triathlon, climbing a mountain, hell going to the gym regularly, whatever – and that pride doesn’t mean that they look down on people who haven’t done these things, just that they take pleasure in their own achievement. It doesn’t mean that the person who sprained their ankle at the start of that marathon is a less worthy person, or that the person who uses a wheelchair who couldn’t do the triathlon should cop blame.
If I’d prepared myself and gone through a long difficult birth just the way I wanted and planned to, I’d feel proud of myself too. Just like I do feel proud of previous challenging experiences in my past (long-distance swimming, athletic competition wins, etc). Heck, I feel proud of myself for recovering from a fairly painful C section, and for persisting through extremely difficult breastfeeding challenges. Doesn’t mean I look down my nose at people who haven’t had those experiences.
I agree with Anu, why is it a competition? If you feel you have made informed choices looking at all the evidence then why do other people feel the need to tell you they did it better because they didn’t have drugs. We cannot compare pain with each other so why do we compete over birth. Of course I agree with women having choices, but it’s the competitiveness that gets me.
I certainly agree with Anu & Cath that “it’s not a competition,” but I have trouble with the idea that if A) a person is proud of how she gave birth it follows that B) she thinks it’s better than how other people did or that she’s better than other people. I would hope that everyone would have the support and agency necessary to feel proud of birthing her own way, of making choices and having strength and all that. An epidural doesn’t somehow remove that. I have a deep sense of pride and satisfaction and strength when I remember the two times I’ve given birth. I’m not working under the delusion that how I did it is best for every woman or family, though.
A lot has to do with tone, but you really can be proud of something outside the context of competition.
Thanks for the article @bluemilk. It reads to me like a call to let go of internalised competitiveness and the idea that there can only be a set number of ways of experiencing and doing birth.
@Anu @Cath well, if competitiveness is the issue, then I doubt that’s confined to the so-called birthzillas. Indeed, calling women birthzillas is a way of marginalising them, which is usually what happens when we perceive something as a competition. There’s also an assumption here that women who do ‘natural birth’ are implicitly, always sneering and patronising about those who make other choices… which reminds me of how people often approach my dietary choice of veganism 😉
I think it is interesting that some of you are uncomfortable about a woman being proud of her birth. I originally had more in the article about that and they edited it for length ..but why are we uncomfortable with a woman’s pride about endurance when it comes to birth? Why do we assume it is competitive? Why can she not show the same machismo as men show about enduring/accomplishing/overcoming/achieving something physically and mentally demanding? (Genuinely interested in your answers and not stirring).
I suppose one could continue the analogy with, say, running a marathon a bit. One could have two kinds of pride in running a marathon. There’s a non (or not necessarily) competitive type of pride: I did a thing that was hard. It hurt. I did lots of work on it. It is a big deal and I am proud.
However, there is often healthist and ableist rhetoric around exercise too. I ran a marathon, which everyone should do, but they don’t because they are lazy and unhealthy, unlike me. Shame on them. They are failing their obligation to be a maximally healthy person. That kind of rhetoric is not uncommon, when it comes to exercise. It’s often benign in intent too, in the sense of “well, surely people have simply not known the joy that is exercise!”
Now, honestly, I don’t really have a sense of how common strong shaming is with birthing. I haven’t encountered active shaming without seeking it out (there are places that gleefully quote shaming originating from the natural/low-intervention birth community, but that’s not the same as encountering the shaming unawares or in its natural proportion, all it proves is that it exists somewhere).
But I have encountered the benign intent version a little bit, in the the overlap in the birthing comunity with complementary and alternative medicine I have very medicalised pregnancies, and probably increasingly so, the kind where I need* not just an obstetrician but one with a “particular interest” in my medical conditions, and regular consultations with non-obstetric specialists. And given all that, I don’t really get to try for the combination of all that particular interest in sick pregnant women and one supportive of low-intervention birth too. And on top of that I find it very difficult to find a doula who is not, to some degree, investing in challenging the medical assessment of my pregnancies and recommending CAM theories or therapies as alternatives**.
Now doulas I’ve met are not all doulas, and not all birth activists are doulas and vice versa, but I am disproportionately influenced of course by those I have met. I think that in some cases there is some healthism there (I won’t speak to ableism, I am not healthy and have especially unhealthy pregnancies but don’t ID as disabled). And that is a tricky mix when one is grieving oneself about loss of a choice one would have frankly liked to safely have and it is then easy to view all kinds of pride as intending to shame, even when there is clearly the non-shaming kind of pride involved too.
* I am pretty radically pro-birth choices, so ‘need’ is maybe not the right word. ‘am strongly medically advised to have, and have agreed to’?
** I don’t usually call myself a skeptic, but it’s probably the shortest way to explain my attitude to CAM therapies.
Fabulous comment! Re: shame, I recall a day in my “we’re strangers who all just had newborns” group wherein the goal was to share birth stories. Bizarrely, 8/9 women who had meticulously planned for low-to-no intervention births ended up with c-sections. They said they’d felt openly shamed by their friends, mothers, spouses, doulas and especially doctors–some quoted conversations (especially from medical personnel) which led me to believe that, yeah, I can absolutely see how you’d get that from that person. The “we’ve failed” permating the room was almost suffocating; after all, how can I take care of my newborn if I couldn’t even have the birth I wanted? Three still wanted to kill themselves over it.
That was some of the most painful sobbing I have ever seen, and by the end of the sharing circle there was not a dry eye in the place, including the facilitator’s.
I don’t so much feel pride in my no-pain-drugs labors as I do joy. They were profoundly empowering experiences for me, as someone who had never been athletic and was very often extremely unwell: they changed my relationship to my body, radically. There’s certainly some pride there, that relates to my own past history, and what I was able to do that I would not have thought I could do. Although I don’t talk about it at the drop of a hat, I do talk about it just as I might about other kinds of transformative personal experiences.
I think what bugs me about the discussion around birth choices is how it often gets presented as a black and white issue, and it isn’t. Medical interventions can save lives- but they aren’t always necessary. Some doctors and hospitals bully women and don’t listen to what they want- but not all of them. Etc. My first child was born vaginally- but had to be induced because labor didn’t start soon enough after my water broke. My second child was born via C-section, because she was a large, breech baby. I have read the evidence. The interventions that were used in both cases are what is supported by the evidence, and were the safest choices for me and my babies. And yet many people will read what I just wrote and assume that I was somehow bullied into interventions that were not warranted, and that my doctor and the hospital I was at caused these to be necessary. That is frankly insulting, and sometimes when people feel insulted they lash out in less than helpful ways. I therefore usually just stay out of the debate, because no one seems interested in recognizing the middle ground that I think I experienced- births at a hospital staffed by caring and educated professionals who did their best to get me the best outcome possible.
For the record, when I had my c-section, my ob/gyn told me my options, the associated risks with both choices, and his recommendation- and then said it was up to me what to do. The baby was a surprise breech and I was in active labor with less than 5 minutes to make a decision, so yes I relied heavily on his recommendation. But the decision was clearly mine to make- everyone in the room paused and waited for me to say what was going to happen next. Yet, because that decision was to have a c-section, many other women assume I was bullied into it.
So sure, women who have birth without interventions should go ahead and be proud of that. But they shouldn”t assume that other women who made different choices did so because they just aren’t educated enough, or because their doctors didn’t listen to them, or even because they are some how not as strong as you. They don’t know our whole situation. And you know what? I’m proud of the decisions I made around the births of my children, too.
I guess one could read that as a woman proud of her birth (which happens to be intervention-free), but in that context, that’s not how it read to me. “However, there’s one mother for whom we reserve a special place at the Table of Hatred, and she is the ‘militant mother’. A woman proud of her intervention-free birth…” Since the previous line refers to her as a “militant mother” (ugh), it seems to me that here the pride is specifically in the fact of the birth being intervention-free.
I don’t at all disagree that one should feel free to be proud of giving birth, by whatever method or birth plan. I guess I don’t see much point in enduring pain, without huge reasons to do so. I can understand completely if women feel that an intervention-free birth is the healthier option for them or their baby, or choose one for any of a number of reasons — but I guess I just don’t understand that machismo about it — where enduring pain seems to be something to strive for in and of itself. But then, I’m not likely to put myself through a marathon any time soon, so perhaps this is just part of my character…
@Anu – it feels a bit like going around in circles. I don’t like the use of the word “machismo” (was that bluemilk’s?) because for me it’s a word with negative associations. But we celebrate in our culture every manner of physical achievement, whether it’s a marathon or climbing Everest. And while I personally would never do either of those things, or compete in an Iron Man as some friends have done (I might even shake my head and think, wow,why would anyone want to do that!) . But I also don’t think that they ran their marathon to shame me, or that they shouldn’t feel or express pride in what they’ve done (even if it’s not something that my specific body could accomplish for whatever reason). And I agree that the way we celebrate physical achievement (mountain climbing or Olympic medalists) can be enshrined in the Cult of Fitness of Ableism, but it’s also separate from that, it’s a celebration of what human bodies can accomplish, which have been celebrated for thousands of years. So why or how is a woman specifically proud of having an intervention free birth any different? It *is* an accomplishment (to her), even if it’s not accomplishment that you value or have any desire to participate in. I’m very proud of my intervention-free birth (and joyful as well, as someone else mentioned upthread). But I’m not ashamed of my intervention-o-rama birth either. Those things don’t have anything to do with each other. I didn’t “succeed” at one and “fail” at the other. I had different births, and different experiences, and I know the difference had less to do with some internal quality of myself (strength! resilience! high pain tolerance!) than luck. In fact, that’s what I dislike most intensely among the smug-birth set [who do exist obviously, but whom I’ve only encountered on the internet and never IRL, and who are clearly a tiny subset of real life people], the seeming unawareness of how much that happened is entirely beyond anyone’s control. But I did plan, and strategize, and endure, and get exactly what I wanted. And also one shouldn’t forget that someone who has an intervention free birth may feel more powerful surges of oxycotin following the birth – I was so hopped up on oxytocin after my #2 it was like I was high for three months, just like athletes are often addicted to their “runner’s high”. (For another analogy, if someone’s proud of graduating from college with honors, does that shame someone who dropped out, let’s say because of a health crisis or family emergency? Yes, the college graduate could be a shamer, but most likely the college graduate is just feeling proud of herself. It’s not a judgment on someone else or his alternate experience. But we would never say to her, you’re not allowed to feel proud of yourself because not everyone had the opportunities you’ve have had, or values education!)
@Cloud – that’s wonderful that you had empowering births with supportive medical staff, that you made educated choices that were respected. I agree that the issue isn’t black and white, yet many many women do *not* have those experiences (imagine if you had decided to birth your breech baby; perhaps your medical staff would have been caring and supportive, and perhaps they would have suddenly become something else;it’s extremely difficult to have a hospital vaginal breech birth in the US). I would stipulate that part of the pride that some women may feel in their intervention-free births is having successfully been able to make their specific choices in spite of a medical system that is overwhelmingly directed at not supporting those choices. It takes *work* not luck to figure out how to have the birth one wants. Of course, it also takes luck or whatever you want to call it, because as you say, the birth goes how it goes, the baby is positioned how it’s positioned, and there isn’t always anything that can be done (or, it can be time for intervention no matter what one’s idealized vision for a birth might be). I felt respected during my intervention-o-rama birth, and felt very proud of my husband and myself for making decisions that day that felt like the *right* decisions, carefully considered. I was so glad I was never pressured or bullied or belittled into them. OTOH, we wouldn’t be in the pickle we’re in (in the US) in maternity care if unnecessary interventions weren’t forced on women all the time. So it makes birth activists skeptical of traditional medicine, and OBs in particular. That skepticism comes from someplace, real experience and medical evidence, even if it’s not applicable in every case.
As others have noted, I have often had women with epidural/C-section births belittle or ridicule intervention-free births to me, or to push the idea of these things on me when I was pregnant. No one talking about how they loooveeed their epidural is ever accused of shaming a woman who doesn’t want one. She loved her epidural. That’s the end of it. I loved my intervention free birth, and feel like I have the right say so (in appropriate moments).
@Erin, when I say the choice to have a c-section was entirely mine, I mean exactly that. My ob/gyn explicitly said he (yes, he) would be with me either way. I believed him then and believe him now. As a nurse told me at the time, he has delivered breech babies vaginally. He recommended against it in my case for two very specific reasons- a large baby and an already exhausted mother (I’d had roughly a month of prodomal labor, which left me quite tired). Also, one of the biggest risks of c-sections wasn’t in play in my case: I knew I didn’t want any more kids, so even though my doctor reassured me about the possibility of a VBAC, it was not a concern in my case.
I understand that some women have very different experiences. But that doesn’t make my experience invalid, or frankly, even extraordinarily rare- I gave birth at one of the busiest hospitals with the most births in my state (California). And this is why I generally stay out of these discussions. I am tired of trying to convince people that I had the experience I had. Some people only want to see the bad in hospital births.
Neither side of this is free of obnoxious people, you know? And that ugliness on both sides is why those of us in the middle generally tune out. Like so many of the controversies around parenting, I think the truth is that different things are right for different women.
Interesting discussion everyone.. thanks. A couple of points I want to make here.
One of them is that I have used the word ‘machismo’ before to describe the way *some* natural birthers express their feelings about birth.. and I have done it deliberately because it is a word that describes their fierce bravado and it is a masculine word, and I wonder if we are inherently more comfortable with men expressing that kind of zeal than women doing so.
Yes, that machismo can be grating but it is not actually demonic and there is a lot of demonising of women that goes on for expressing that aggressive pride in their birthing achievements. Plus, not everyone expressing pride in their birth does so in such fierce way but they get shamed easily for their pride and I want to think about whether we are punishing women for being ‘cocky’ about their births when we would accept that response in men for other feats.
The other point I would like to add is that we really solidify our views in the face of opposing views and I think untangling the defensiveness is difficult once the argument is on. I mean, somehow we ended up in a situation where Mia Freedman called women with birth plans “birthzillas” and I’m pretty certain she wouldn’t have started at that position.. this would have come about after engaging in some debates or reading debates between mothers. (Can’t say for certain as we haven’t had a conversation about it, but it’s an extreme view she is expressing, ironically, about women she believes to be extremists).
This is a point that I originally had in the article, which was taken out by the editor for the word limit and to streamline the piece. So yes, I have found some birth activists dogmatic but I keep in mind that they are in a fairly confrontational environment. And really, the opposition to them is mighty – big powerful medical and legal institutions, so, in part, I imagine the dogma is a response to that, to needing to mount arguments against very well-organised and resourced institutions.
I’ve got to say that I am finding the discussion here really fascinating and I am pleased people are engaging with the arguments I am presenting in the article.
Here’s another point that developed out of a twitter discussion with @lauredhel and I’m paraphrasing her here so try this on for size:
The aversion to women expressing pride in their intervention-free birth also silences women who grieve the loss of their intervention-free birth.
There needs to be balance between celebrating strength, achievement and joy and recognising the multiple paths to that sense of achievement. (As some noted here, it is possible to feel very proud of your intervention births, too).
When you refer to women as birthzillas you are saying that intervention-free birth has no value and women are wrong to place value on it. The idea that pride about an intervention-free birth automatically represents the notion that your own intervention birth is less worthy can only come from someone who *does* see it all as competition. You’re basically projecting competitiveness. Exhibit A: Mia Freedman’s article on birthzillas. The idea that you’re proud of your intervention-free birth and that has nothing to do with anyone else is an anti-competitive view.
“The aversion to women expressing pride in their intervention-free birth also silences women who grieve the loss of their intervention-free birth.”
This. Absolutely.
I’ve experienced the opposite. When I’m with friends who’ve had home births and such I never feel judged for having had a hospital birth. But I have been around people talking about how “crazy” anyone is to go without the epidural. I had a birth plan, it was fine until things went sideways so we re-evaluated so I have both the experience of being committed to a natural birth and the experience of having to get an epidural and an emergency c-section. For the most part, it hasn’t been the birth activists that make me feel judged.
Kristin, I haven’t experienced judgementalism about my intervention-free birth from my epidural-friends (who include an anaesthetist, I might add) but I definitely found them campaigning for the epidural every bit as enthusiastically as my natural birth friends did for non-intervention. When I had an epidural for the second birth, and liked it, my epidural-friends were like, see, it rocks.. which would be translated to competitiveness, were it expressed by intervention-free birthers about say, homebirth?
I found your experience interesting, thanks for sharing it.
Don’t really agree with this. I don’t think mothers who promote epidurals and mothers who promote drug-free births are comparable in the way you suggest. People don’t take “pride” in having an epidural (eg: “Whooohooo! I just gave birth WITH an epidural! Grrrrr!”). I have enthusiastically promoted the epidural, not because I was proud of having one but because I think it is an amazing invention and there is a lot of bad publicity about it. It wasn’t connected to my pride about my birthing experience. Whereas I think that with mothers who have drug-free births, their pride in their birth is often intricately connected to the fact that they didn’t have drugs. The fathers too “My wife is SUCH hero – completely drug-free birth! Grrrrrrr!”
I think it’s worth thinking about how these expressions transmit through the generations. I recall my mother telling me (as a teenager) her stories of giving birth, with pride, and part of the pride was that she had good memories of the experience and hadn’t used pain medication. I also recall her telling me about never being good at sports and lacking the “competitive spirit,” and she was sometimes mocked for her caution about physical risks. I think her pride (which she felt profoundly though she didn’t express it often) had two good effects: 1) It made her feel that there was something her body was good at, competent at, where it maybe even shone a bit compared to other bodies, and 2) It helped me and my friends think of giving birth in the future with less fear. Now, someone who had an intervention-heavy birth could also tell their story in a way that reassured the younger generation (“the baby was big and presented breach, but the medical personnel were able to do a C-section, and everyone turned out safe and healthy” or “I felt a lot of pain, and I didn’t like that, but the epidural made the pain go away.”) However, the sense of accomplishment that my mother felt, that her body had done something in a superlative way and this was worth being proud of, also said something to us about the status of womanly bodies. As others have pointed out, we don’t get angry when people talk about having run marathons — and that is because we accept the status of this accomplishment, and we don’t assume that anyone who mentions it is putting down others. By being able to with kindness and admiration acknowledge someone whose birth experiences showed, as well as some luck, superlative functioning of their body/mind, means that we acknowledge the status and power of female bodies, and that’s good! It doesn’t mean one person is any less of a person than another, and that should be true regardless of the accomplishment being discussed.
This is a fascinating discussion. I went in to childbirth with the idea of staying intervention-free and needed an epidural and pitocin the first time and an epidural the second time. I say needed because I felt that I needed it; my body was giving out. The first time I’d been in labor for 27 hours and was dehydrated and exhausted and 4 cm dilated. The second time I’d been in labor for 8 hours and was dehydrated and exhausted and 5 cm dilated. Could I have pushed through it (no pun intended), maybe. But why?
My mom had three intervention-free births with serious tearing. I called her while in labor the first time, and she told me that if she had been given the choice, she would’ve taken that epidural all three times. But it wasn’t really given to her as an option, it wasn’t seen as necessary, even though she was in labor for 36 hours. She told me, stop trying to be a hero, put away your macho side, and think about your health and the baby’s health, that’s all that matters.
I’ve thought about this a lot after both labors. I’m still curious what it feels like to make it through an entire labor. But I know that neither time was right for me to find out. Importantly, I felt that both times I made my own choice. I was informed, I had supportive doctors, nurses, and the second time midwives. The first time, my labor was stalling and the baby was stressed. The second time, my labor affected the nerves in my legs and each contraction froze my legs between contractions.
And yet still, I agree with another commenter, people will judge me as being pushed into things by the hospital. They are supposed to be the evil ones – unless you buy into medicating everything, then they are great. The only thing I buy into is taking medication when I feel it is necessary, and I’m the one who knows my pain and energy thresholds when I’m bumping up against them.
After my first birth, I felt almost ashamed, like I let everyone down. Can you imagine? I had a healthy baby boy, I was healthy, all was well. And I felt like I gave up, did something wrong. After my second birth, I felt a pang of regret for giving up too – again, with a healthy baby boy in my arms. But what did I give up? My chance to experience pain? I’m not good with pain – I put bandaids on papercuts because they distract me for days with the stinging pain. So why did I feel so judged for making my own informed choice? I did the best I could, I thought – the best at what? Avoiding intervention? Do I spend all day trying to endure a headache until I can no longer stand it and take a Tylenol? I still don’t feel like I’ve closed this train of thought with myself, but I do know that if I have another baby, I’ll do the same thing again: see how it goes, and if I don’t want to stand the pain any longer, get an epidural. The important part is health, not my pride.
I beat myself up a lot after my first birthing experience because I had gone in really unprepared and later realised that had I been more proactive I might not have gone down the induction/caesarian path that I did. But when I said this to a really crunchy homebirth midwife type she said that there is no way of knowing what could have happened so I shouldn’t feel ashamed for the way things turned out. I really wish that I could have had the chance to birth with her, she was wonderful.
I think we also forget that women without recourse to the hospital system in other countries sometimes labour for days and need the help of the wonderful Fistula hospital and women still die in childbirth. We need to go easier on ourselves. However your labour experience works out it is rarely a walk in the park.
You know, when I hear women speak of their intervention-free births in a positive way I find it inspirational rather than competitive, judgey, etc. And as someone up-thread said, I hear just as many women say ‘pain with a purpose’ as ‘don’t be a hero, take the epidural!’
I have experienced both types of birth and the 2nd time around without an epidural & ventouse was so much better for me, I felt simply amazing afterwards and my baby fed much better too. Of course, it was a shorter labour & birth, the baby was better positioned etc. I was no more of a hero, the labour just progressed well, aided by some extra techniques I tried which happened to keep things moving along. You never know what will happen on the day or how your body will respond.
Other friends of mine have found induction + epidural + routine episiotomy their dream scenario.
My second birth was a happy outcome for me because I felt that the cascade of interventions the first time around, which while medically appropriate had led to pain and difficulty with feeding and bonding. I agreed with the comment that taking the importance of a complication and intervention-free birth away minimizes the sadness when those things aren’t achieved.
I would really hope that when I share my stories I don’t come across as a zealot. I would’t say I was even boastful. In fact I’ve never heard of women being boastful about their births, as a previous person said joyful is a much better description.
They are issues well worth exploring. I do apologise that your story was edited for length but I think the piece was strong enough with the edits – happy for you to post the full version here!
As someone who grew up in a crunchy-granola, homeschooling family in my experience sometimes alternative life choices are read as implicit criticism by folks who’ve gone a different route — regardless of how you present yourself. When you’re pushing against the mainstream — even if only for yourself — you can be seen as an uncomfortable trouble-maker who is calling other peoples’ choices (or perhaps things they didn’t really think WERE a choice) into question. EVEN IF you couch those decisions in purely personal “this is what works for me/my family” terms.
I’m not saying that there are not holier-than-thou birth activists who turn parenting into a project to bolster their identity as Perfect Person. But I think that it is more often the case that women (or families) that advocate for their own freedom to practice the life that works for them are identified as problematic because they challenge the status quo — even if they aren’t preaching their choices as the One True Choice.
My parents got hate from a lot of quarters because their alterna choices seemed to be working well (for our family) and anxious other parents started to wonder whether they had made the wrong choice. Our family had no control over that — these parents were judging themselves! — but we often got resentment and anger as a by-product of other peoples’ insecurities.
Again, not saying judgyness never happens in alterna circles (oh my GOD does the judgyness happen!) … but I think a good percentage of the time it’s false attribution by someone who’s judging themselves and then laying that feeling of shame or anger on the person who was able or chose the path the observer wishes they had chosen for themselves.
How differently people perceive statements on these issues is fascinating. I remember finding the advice on pain relief during labour that our antenatal instructor gave us as quite balanced. However, another couple from the class, who were a nurse and doctor, perceived the advice as anti-drugs for pain relief. I suppose as medical professionals they were more comfortable with drugs?
[…] as some dominating group of mothers that she is bravely breaking free of when, actually, having a medicalised birth is hardly taking the path of most resistance in Australia. (I should probably disclose here that I have a foot in both camps having chosen a birth centre […]
[…] Finally, the slacker mother movement seems to be taking a nasty turn lately towards judging mothers it sees as being too dedicated to the pursuit of motherhood. This begs the question what business is it of yours how another mother does her care work, because it’s inherently sexist that we routinely consider women’s lives our business and that we also have so many ways to criticise women? Also, are you sure she isn’t the oppressed minority, rather than you? In which case, step off her neck you big bully, she’s got enough on her plate. Lauren Rosewarne’s piece for The Drum was a classic example of this problem, in my opinion, as was Mia Freedman’s piece about birth activists, which I tackled in this article of mine atEssential Baby. Even Caro’s piece, which is notably about “over-mothering,” pictures ‘intervention-free birthers’ as some dominating group of mothers she is bravely breaking free of when, actually, having a medicalised birth is hardly taking the path of most resistance in Australia. […]