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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Give me drugs!
What's so feminist about a painful childbirth?
By Nina Shapiro
[08/03/99]

Cut me open!
I just had my second scheduled Caesarean and, yes, I still consider myself a feminist.
By Jean Hanff Korelitz
[08/02/99]

Hot Flash
Blood brothers
Cary and Steven Stayner were connected by violence. One is a murderer. The other, a victim, is remembered by a childhood friend.
By Sarah Beach
[07/30/99]

Hot Flash
Gay marriage in the Methodist Church
The Rev. Don Fado has put his ministry on the line for homosexual rights. "I wasn't being disobedient," he says. "The church was disobedient, losing sight of what it's meant to be."
By Suzanne Marmion
[07/29/99]

The pits
Summertime and the living would be easy -- if women didn't have to shave or wax constantly.
By Mei Yan Leung
[07/28/99]

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Surely all that prep was worth avoiding all the interventions of a hospital birth? Well, no. Before the birth, even though my midwife and I had a legitimate disagreement about what my actual due date should have been, she encouraged me to move forward with an herbal induction when I reached the dreaded 42nd week (only the 41st week or less by my calculation). When labor was finally under way at a rate I thought I could live with, she broke another of what I thought were cardinal rules of homebirth, and told me that my labor was not "progressing" fast enough. She then performed that most pleasant of interventions, an enema, and with a few seconds of "informed consent" that I remember as something along the lines of "this won't hurt a bit," offered a homeopathic dose of blue cohosh to supposedly get the labor going again -- and broke the bag of waters.

Without water as a cushion, my baby's head plunged onto my cervix, which of course led to an early desire to push that swelled my cervix closed again and led me to the hospital, where I necessarily cascaded through the rest of the usual interventions: IVs with Pitocin and glucose and water, an intrauterine pressure device, catheter, antibiotics, monitoring devices screwed onto the baby's head and an epidural -- well, two epidurals. The first one wandered off my spine and gave me a sweet high until we all realized something was very wrong and the epidural had to be rebooted. It was 12 hours after my drive to the hospital, desperately panting all the way, that I finally got to turn off the pain medications and do what I'd been waiting a half-day for: push the baby out on my own.

More surprising than the fact that the baby was born perky, pink and Apgar-ready was that the hospital bore little resemblance to the halls of horror I'd been reading about. I didn't get my ceremonial staph infection; I didn't feel the place was a sterile, inhuman baby factory conceived to control women's destinies. What I got was 24-hour breast-feeding assistance; night nurses, each with a new helpful nipple squeeze; someone to make my meal, albeit an unsettling one, and take that meal away (thank God). Yes, my insurance company was paying thousands a day for the services, but those services did come in handy: I had one kindly nurse who offered extra measures to help me through the frightening first defecation. Would my midwives have come over at 4 a.m., after my three days of labor and fourth day without sleep, and taken the baby for a few hours so I could get some of the most necessary rest of my life? I doubt it.

(My midwife, as it had turned out, had to leave her advocacy perch at my bedside to attend to her other client in labor just five minutes before the pushing phase of my own labor began. The phalanx of residents and nurses who had swarmed around my bed during parts of the night somehow evaporated. Which left a room with only me, my partner and my best friend, holding a mirror for what seemed like entire minutes as the baby's head began to crown. When he arrived, it was, as they say, the best moment of my life.)

I had plenty of time to relive the glory as I reclined for three days on freshly laundered hospital sheets with TV and phone at the ready. Why had I chosen homebirth in the first place? It wasn't the "home" part of it -- I rent a city apartment, and it's not exactly the height of comfort and ease; it's more like a repository of unfinished business and moldy corners. Was it an act of protest? If so, I'd come to the wrong march. I found out the hard way that my midwife's reasons for giving me a homebirth appeared to be far different from my reasons for wanting one. If I wanted nature to take its course, and was willing to take the necessary risks to let that happen, she wanted nature to take her course -- a paved road through the woods.

Though I may have been dropping out of one system, I was also tumbling head-first into a new one, with its own ready-made worldview and marketing tie-ins. Cloth diapers? Check. Circumcision? Negatory. But do I have to claim I'm in sync with the entire history of man as I make these consumer choices? Along with the fluffy organic cotton can come a fuzzy thought process: The late 20th century midwifery movement is based on a logic that isn't always practiced in its literature. You get rampant speculation when some of its greatest voices call up history and anthropology to bolster their views. Suzanne Arms, the author of "Immaculate Deception," writes that the "birthing woman has lost touch with her ancient female lineage," which is why she fears the pain of birth. Was she there to hear my ancient female lineage complain? As for the birthing practices of traditional cultures, which always come in handy when criticizing Western medicine, how many women would enjoy the method that Midwifery Today reports the Guarani of northern Bolivia use to get the placenta out: making the mother gag on a chicken feather?

Next page | I'll take the hospital, thank you