How Does Fetishizing Birth Help Mothers?
“This is what I want to say to every young woman in the world: your birth is the most important event in shaping your life as a mother.…You need a loving midwife, because the effects of the birth year—positive or negative—will affect your whole life, your baby’s whole life, and indeed society, as your decisions reverberate through herstory.”
"Nienke and Nienke" by Michel van de Wiel/CC by via Flickr
I wasn’t going to post about Jan Tritten’s piffle again so soon, but dang if she didn’t manage to post the above just after I had a somewhat challenging parenting day.
I submit that any woman who believes that birth is the most important event “shaping [her] life as a mother” is utterly unprepared for the realities of being a parent.
What gets my goat—aside from her habitual reduction of motherhood to a single cardinal moment—is that Tritten and others who espouse similar philosophies are actually helping to ensure that some women perceive their birth experiences as somehow tainted, or believe that they have failed in the first and most important test of motherhood.
How does this help women and babies?
While I agree with Squillo that unrealistic expectations and fetishizing birth experience does not help women, I think one important thing that we midwives, midwifery students and doulas are running into is the vast gulf between the sub-optimal care that women in the United States receive and what could be. Check out childbirthconnections.org, a pretty neutral site that explains the choices women can make at birth and the impact on subsequent outcomes.
I would encourage everyone who vehemently abhores either home birth or hospital birth to go observe one yourself. Working in both settings has been eye-opening for me. Midwives need obstetricians for back-up. And obstetricians need midwives to help keep birth normal in the first place.
The stories people citing above are simply stories – anecdotal evidence. We have shockingly high maternal mortality in this country – and a LOT of that is related to C/S. Your potential for death following a C/S is low, but much much higher than a vaginal birth. And C/S can often be more difficult for the baby, as well.
I have no interest in guilt-tripping women – about breastfeeding, natural birth or natural parenting. We have enough unrealistic expectations of perfection launched on us from every side. I’m not criticizing the women for not knowing. I’m criticizing our sad lack of birth culture in the United States and our sub-optimal maternity care system. We can do better.
Are we reading the same letter from Midwifery Today’s editor? I didn’t once read where she describes anything specific about the “birth experience”, she does not say what it would look like except offer her opinion that midwifery care is the safest care and suggests that all women birthing in a hospital bring an advocate.
The Midwifery Model Of Care is just a different kind of care then the Medical Model of Care. It’s not about the outcome, it’s about how the mother and baby are treated during the process of birth, which greatly effects the health of the baby and mother. I am not a birth worker. I am just a mother with three kids. And although I don’t think any one moment can possible be defined as the most important in mothering, the fact that my children entered the world surrounded by LOVE and I was RESPECTED….that is amazingly important. Jan makes a sweeping statement, but sometimes they need to be made. It doesn’t matter where I had my baby or how they came out, what matters is that I was treated like a human being. Nobody told me how long it should take me to dilate or told me I was failing to progress. Nobody told me I had to agree to anything but to have my baby. Birth comes at you in many ways…we can never predict, nor should we. It’s a fucking mystery. But LOVE. Love. If you felt the LOVE at the birth of your child, then perfect. Perfect. Love goes a long way.
The main thing that I take issue with in the post I referenced (and I’m apparently not the only one), is the idea that birth is ‘”the most important event shaping your life as a mother.”
Aside from outcomes–healthy baby, healthy mother–how does the birth experience “affect your whole life” or your baby’s whole life? Of course, if you have bought into the idea that a specific set of choices (and make no mistake, Tritten advocates a very specific set of choices) are the very best, and that birth is definitive of one’s experience as a mother, when things don’t go as planned it may very well affect your emotional well-being far beyond the birth year. Tritten constantly implies that one “kind” of birth is superior, regardless of the outcome, or how the mother may actually feel about it. She does not say, as you do, that it doesn’t matter where you have your baby or how it came out. To her, it seems to matter very much indeed.
Again, I ask, how does this help women and babies?
Squillo–You couldn’t be more right. My son has cerebral palsy because of a birth injury. His midwives were more concerned about a “natural” birth than dealing with a very serious emergency and calling in a doctor when they were supposed to, and my son suffered brain damage as a result. We were at a hospital, I had a doula, and I put in all the “work”–I didn’t even have any pain meds. My only mistake was putting my trust in these women and the idealized version of childbirth they were promoting.
(You don’t hear more from mothers like me because we need to protect the very large settlements we receive from hospitals to provide the often life-long care our children need.)
I’m sorry for your son’s injury, and hope he is thriving despite it.
Your story is a sobering example of putting the process of birth ahead of the outcome.
There are a lot of great midwives out there, but there is a (small, I hope) group of self-proclaimed birth activists that are, in my opinion, a hazard to women and babies.
I had c-sections under general anesthetic. My daughters are beautiful children and the way they got here honestly doesn’t matter to me. And a good thing, too, otherwise I’d be so consumed by my “failure” to deliver vaginally that I’d be too busy to be their mother.
I agree Squillo. There is no one right way to have a baby. Some folks are thrilled with their elective repeat c-section. And don’t get me started on bonding and the adoptive parent. If what some “experts”say about bonding it true, then my sister’s kids are not nearly loved enough because my sister did not have them pass through her vagina. Now that is ridiculous! My sister loves her children very very much and they have bonded just fine. I find it an insult to adpotive parents….But I will shut up now before I go off. Which going off is not hard to do…
you are completely misinterpreting the whole point of midwifery. for many of us out there, we want this information, we need this help. no need to twist the information. there is no set-up. women can have a beautiful experience if they choose to do the work. getting out the information is vital to our health. i have not seen anyone work as hard as midwives. love them!!!
I am not attempting to comment on midwifery; I love midwives, too–a CNM saved my son’s life. I think Jan Tritten is a poor representative for midwifery.
Information is one thing, but what Tritten does is attempt to define what is “good birth” and “bad birth” for women in general, according to totally subjective criteria.
Women can–and do–have beautiful experiences having done no work at all (I did.) Others can do all the “work” Tritten recommends, and have terrible experiences–made all the worse by Tritten’s pontification on the topic.
What Tritten does is set suggestible women up to believe that, if they don’t have a very specific birth experience, it’s a) objectively bad; b) their fault; and c) going to affect their–and their baby’s(!) whole lives.
I think that’s wicked.
I read a message board where two women had homebirths and were shocked by how difficult they were and how far they were from what they expected. Both women were having a second child and that, combined with all the work they did to prepare, led them to believe labor would be relatively easy. Both had labors that were so horribly painful that they are considering hospital births for any subsequent children so they can get the epidural. Luckily, both these women are pretty strong and stable emotionally, so they aren’t crushed with disappointment over how it turned out. But they both say they found unmedicated labor to be a humbling experience and they would never judge another woman for opting for pain relief. Too bad Liz Tritten isn’t as wise.
No shit! Huh? It just feeds the notion that some women have “failed” at birth. I believe birth does matter and if you can have a nice birth that can really make you feel wonderful about the whole process and I do think, thinking positively about the birth experience is helpful. But to think that one day will effect your whole life no matter who you are, is not helpful or in fact true in any way.
I do think that going into the process with a positive attitude is really really helpful. And I do think having a plan beyond just inserting an epidural is helpful too. Because your epidural may not work out as well as you had hoped. But I think only zealots fetish birth. Hey not everyone is mentally sound.
Birth is obviously an important emotional event, but to set up such grand expectations is so harmful. A good attitude is one thing–nothing wrong with hopeful expectation that overall it will be a positive experience–but believing one can control the many of the specifics if only one does the “right” things is a sure set up for disappointment. And yet, this is exactly what Tritten is selling.
My first birth involved a fair amount of intervention and some scary moments–I certainly didn’t expect them–but, given the good outcome, I look back on it as a very happy, and largely pleasant experience. If I had bought into Tritten’s crap, I might very well be disappointed and “traumatized.”