The Origins of the “Natural Childbirth” Movement – Racism, Classism, and Sexism

This is something very hard for me to write. It is hard to write on one level because I have a physical reaction of trauma and rage when I talk about it or think about it – something which has precluded me ever talking about it much before. It is easier for me to write about having been raped and beaten by my male family members and partners than it is for me to talk about childbirth. On another level it is hard for me to write about because of the immensely negative reaction I receive to talking about such things. But this is the truth as I have experienced it from a literal gut level.

"Natural childbirth" is something we hear people talking about a lot, and often these people are feminist. Reclaiming birth from a male-controlled medical establishment idea of what it should be is a very good idea. Birth is the province of women – no matter how hard men try, pregnancy and birth is not something they can do hemselves. They can regulate it, manage it, control it – or try, but they cannot do it, know how it really feels, or ever fully comprehend what it is like in the way a woman who has given birth can know these things. But this doesn't stop them from having opinions on how women should do it, of course. They seem blind to their supreme arrogance in dictating the birth experience.

The "Natural Childbirth" movement was started by men. Men who claim the pain of childbirth is either all in our silly little heads or not really all that bad, and if we would just be good little girls and do some deep breathing techniques and other relaxation techniques, we could give birth much better and we'd realize we were just being spoiled and selfish for wanting pain relief drugs because the most important thing is the fetus/child which we are birthing and what's a little "discomfort" to that?

This is like so many other things men say and do to women. Our pain does not exist to them, or in unimportant. Premenstrual problems? All in your head! Post-partum depression? You're just lazy! Abdominal pain from "female complaints"? It can't be that bad, we don't see anything obviously wrong with you, quit complaining! Debilitating headaches? Maybe you should just relax a little, take an asprin, they can't be that bad! Denying the pain of childbirth is just another way men, particularly doctors, have of denying women's pain in general. Women's medical complaints are still met with accusations of mental illness, disbelief, a conviction that she must be exaggerating.

It disturbs me that feminism has embraced this male-originiating movement which denies women's feelings. It is true that the male dominated medical establishment has gone way too far in managing birth, to the detriment of women and babies, and to that end I think fighting routine episiotomies, unneccesary pubic shaving, and insisting that a woman lie flat on her back duiring labor are worthy and important efforts. But the litmus test now given to women is that of pain medication. Indeed, when people say "a natural birth" nowadays, they mean "one without any pain relief whatsoever." It is now a popular opinion that breathing methods are a perfectly acceptable way of dealing with the pain of childbirth, which can be horrific, ripping, tearing, cramping pain that goes on for many hours or even days, pain so intense that it has been used as a benchmark for agony for thousands of years. It is incredibly difficult these days to find a dissenting opinion to this. Women are now held to a suspiciously macho-seeming posture of talking about how they went through 12-36 hours of labor with no medication and loved every minute of it. Women who talk publically about how the pain was bad and they couldn't handle it are treated like pariahs. How could they be so selfish as to demand relief for their pain when it could have had an effect on their precious baby! As said in this excellent Salon article on the subject:

"I discovered a childbirth culture that makes women embarrassed to want pain relief — one that worships the "natural," unmedicated birth as an experience verging on the mystical… . Natural birth ceased to be merely an option and became the "right" kind of birth — a sign of true womanhood. It is taken for granted in this culture that every woman should go into labor intending to take as much pain as she can stand — and maybe more."
As she says in the same article, feminists used to agitate for women to receive pain relief during labor – now they raise the standard of the Earth Mother.

When I was pregnant, some men I knew would joke and laugh about their ex-girlfriends or wives and how they screamed during labor, how much they screamed, how long. Laughs of derision mingled with annoyance that she behaved "badly". When I went through a long recovery from a difficult birth I was insulted by men who told me in "other" countries – the country would change from time to time, or it would be Native American women, but always some non-white culture – women worked in the fields up until they dropped the baby, dropped it, and went right back to work. Men would tell me about how THEIR ex was demanding to leave the hospital a few minutes after having the baby, with obvious disdain for my not working harder. The message was clear – if a woman can't be macho and tough about giving birth, lasting 12-36 hours without so much as a Tylenol and getting up to clean the house an hour later, she is a pathetic creature not worthy of any human respect.

I think part of this denial of women's pain and the realities of childbirth comes from a particularly modern, industrialized phenomenon – many people (most?) have never witnessed a woman giving birth (a half-hour video made for the purposes of a childbirth class doesn't count.) In the 1800s, if you were a girl, by the time you were old enough to have children, chances were you'd been present at several births. You would have seen the pain and danger that giving birth entailed. You may even have seen a friend or relative die giving birth. Even if you had not been at a birth, you would have known of several women in your social circle who died having a child, maternal deaths during childbirth being very common until the advent of the same modern medical techniques the natural birth advocates so despise. Childbirth, and the knowledge that it was painful and dangerous, would not be a great mystery to you. But now, many women only see a birth if they have a very close sister or friend who invites them to theirs. I myself have never been present for any birth other than my own. I know lots of other women who have never seen anyone give birth at all. We are becoming disconnected from what giving birth means. It is an abstract concept to us, and thus, when we find ourselves pregnant, we are particularly susceptible to disinformation. The hippies, with their disdain of anything "unnatural", made the so-called natural childbirth movement popular. But its true origins are from an earlier time in history. When the concept of anesthesia use during childbirth was first presented in the mid-1800's, feminists pushed for it to become commonly accepted. They were resisted, sometimes by doctors who knew that the primitive methods of pain relief were sometimes dangerous to mother and child, and sometimes by religious fundamentalists, who liberally quoted from Genesis about how God wanted women to suffer while giving birth as a punishment for Eve's sin.

But then a man named Grantley-Dick Read wrote a book about "Natural Childbirth". Naturally, he knew women had been doing it all wrong! Women just imagined labor should be painful, he reasoned, so if they deprogram themselves, it won't hurt anymore! In other words, "it's all in your head." Sometimes, he claimed, women couldn't throw off their fears and needed drugs, but he remained adamant that the origin of pain was all in a woman's head. This is just another way of saying, if it hurts, it's YOUR OWN FAULT. Why would a male doctor become so sure he knew whether or not women truly experienced pain during labor? Why, once he attended a birth by a woman who didn't experience pain during labor. Rather than inferring that she was simply a very lucky woman, he decided to use her as an insult to all other mothers everywhere who experienced pain during labor – it was their own fault for being weak and fearful.

Or was this a disingenuous lie meant to cover his real agenda – religious fundamentalism, classim and racism? This idea of "natural childbirth" didn't originate with him, after all – it originiated with racist white European men, who were disturbed by the dropping birth rate of middle class white European women. Worried that the hordes of brown-skinned non-Christians whould take over Europe, they began promoting the idea that childbirth was naturally easy and relatively painless to any healthy, "non-neurotic" woman, and used positive stereo-types of "primitives" to bolster their position:

"Among primitive people, still natural in their habits and living under conditions which favour the healthy development of their physical organisation, labour may be characterised as short and easy, accompanied by few accidents and followed by little or no prostration… The squaws of the Madoc Indians—a tribe which has been little but affected by the advance of civilisation—suffers but an hour or even less in the agony of childbirth… two hours being the average time for North American Indians".
While it was true that "primitive" women were seen to suffer less childbirth death than "civilized" women, this was because the life of "civilized" (white) women and girls in Europe was so constrained they rarely got enough sunlight and exercise, and when combined with nutritional deficiencies, this led to rickets, which malformed the hips, causing difficult birth. And despite his theories on the more positive attitude of "primitive women", when he began to practice obstretics in South Africa, tribal women were eager for pain relief. There is little evidence that only "spoiled" Western women in industrialized countries find childbirth to be difficult and frigtening. And while being quiet during labor is valued in many cultures, this is not a way of saying there is no pain – instead, women were exhorted to bear the pain of labor as warriors – and virtually every culture had some herbal preparation to ease pain and speed labor along. Believing a woman should remain quiet during labor is not the same as denying that there is sucha thing as labor pain at all.

When I was pregnant with my son, I wanted pain relief in labor, I knew this throughout my entire pregnancy. I was poor and had little option as to where to receive prenatal care or give birth. The one hospital I could go to had a policy that they would give NO pain relief in labor except an epidural, which of course you can't have until labor is fairly far along.

At 42 weeks of pregnancy, after a month of contractions which were irregular and only had me dilated to 2 cm despite all the walking around I could stand, I developed toxemia and high blood pressure. I had no choice but to have my labor induced, or I COULD HAVE DIED. Before modern medicine, I would almost assuredly have died, and my son as well. So for this reason (as well as many others), I do not buy the idea that all medical intervention is bad.

However, the hospital labor and delivery culture is still toxic, at least for poor Southern women. I have a visceral anger towards every person at that hospital who was invovled in my labor experience, as well as the writers of books like "What to Expect When You're Expecting" for publishing outright lies in their efforts to push their natural birth agenda. I went into the hospital – they broke my water, which the book insisted would be totally painless. I was overwhelmed with the unexpected shock of the horrible stabbing sensation – no anticipation of pain there that made me imagine pain where there was none. I was not allowed so much as a drink of water – I had a blood pressure cuff on my arm, an IV drip of glucose and magnesium sulfate, I had a fetal monitor on and a heart monitor and a monitor which showed how my contractions were doing, I was catherized (except when I referred to the object as a catheter the nurse acted annoyed and said "It's a FOLEY" as if that made any practical difference to me whatsoever.) I was given Pitocin to make my irregular contractions actually DO something. I should have been given pain relief right then, because I didn't have a gradual increase of labor pains, they came on hard and fast, and instead of having a short contraction with two-five minutes in betweeen, as I'd been taught to expect by the book, I had two minute long contractions with a break of several SECONDS in between each one. This went on for SIX HOURS, during which I was mainly ignored by all hospital staff. The book told me induced labor would be a bit harder, but it didn't even hint at the possibility that it would be this bad. I felt like I was caught in a relentless machine. I was, however, quiet, concentrating on breathing to the exclusion of being able to do anything else. At one point I began convulsively dry heaving, at which point I lost my cool entirely and started screaming between heaving so strongly and contracting that I thought I wasn't going to be able to breathe aymore. This extreme distress earned me a snappy remark by the nurse, who was across the room with her back to me, filling out some sort of paperwork – "Now miss, you need to concentrate on doing some deep breathing." Then she walked out.

FInally someone came in and asked if I wanted an epidural now, to which I eagerly replied yes – only to be told five minutes later they had to wait anoter 20 minutes. Then they fiorced my husband to leave the room, and told me I had to sign a bunch of paperwork before I could get any pain relief. Now consider – that I had gone into the hospital NOT in labor – they could have had me sign the paperwork then, but they waited until I was in horrific pain and then told me to obtain any pain relief I had to sign all this paperwork. I would have signed anything – I'm not even clear on what it was I signed, I know I didn't read it all. One of them had to do with immunizing the baby after it was born – as if that couldn't have waited. My contractions were so intense I could not sign anything while I was having them – I could at most sign my name once or twice between contractions, and there were 6-8 papers to sign. After the first round of signatures, when I was again able to I started scribbling my name as fast as possible, and the nurse laughed at me for being in a hurry to obtain relief. Finally I obtained my epidural – I went from feeling like I was being crushed by each contraction to barely feeling them at all. It was amazing and miraculous, the best thing that could possibly have happened to me. I was able to doze slightly over the next few hours and gain the strength I needed to push when the time came. I did feel all of the pushing contractions too – they weren't painful though, just extremely intense. The epidural did not slow the second stage of my labor down – once I started pushing, I gave birth in about 15 minutes.

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM WITH THIS?

Natual birth advocates say I should have "embraced" the horrible agony that made me wish I were dead for another 5 hours, using all of my energy to simply avoid screaming. I fail to see how his would have benefitted either me or my son. The rest I got from receiving pain relief improved my well-being and thuis my son's well-being, enabling me to give birth to him quickly, which turned out to be very important as, at the end, his heart rate began dipping with each contraction. If I were exhausted from trying to be Miss Tough Birth Giver and All American Natural Woman 1996, I might not have had the energy after 11 hours of induced labor to finish the job. I would have been even better off if I'd been given some sort of pain relief or sedative earlier in labor as well. Of course, I also would have been better off if I had not been in a hospital hooked up to a million things – but I had developed a complication, one that isn't terribly uncommon in first time mothers. Is every woman who develops severe pre-eclampsia supposed to tough out a horrible birth experience to prove she is a total woman? Is this in any way a feminist position?

I am filled with anger over the horror and trauma of my birth giving experience. I have gotten a tubal ligation in order to avoid ever risking going through such a horror again. Yet I find I am not allowed to talk about how terrible it was – my pain is denied or minimized by the relentless phrase, "But you have a healthy happy baby now and THAT'S ALL THAT MATTERS, ISN'T IT?" No, no, no. I am "selfish" enough to say that the child I gave birth to is NOT all that matters. MY FEELINGS MATTER TOO. I never wanted to be a martyr-hero in the delivery room. I WANTED TO NOT FEEL LIKE I WAS BEING MOCKED AND TORTURED. I didn't get that, and no patriarchy supporter cares because women don't matter in their universe, and no feminist natural birther seems to care because my real experiences screw up their ideological position. Perhaps they should consider this position, and how closely it aligns with the right-wing pro-life position that giving birth is just natural and wonderful and therefore having an abortion rather than having a child and giving it away is just pure selfishness, since pregnancy and birth are just so NATURAL. Not everything "natural" is GOOD. Death is natural and we fight death. Disease is natural and we fight disease. Unbearable pain during labor is natural, and there is no reason not to find a safe way to relieve it. If you LIKE being in agony, it is your choice, but I'm sick of the value judgements of "weak" and "selfish" that are placed on me because I think pain relief during labor is a blessing straight from heaven.

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