Ladies! How do you know you are good at this mothering schtick? Is it from how happy and healthy your children are? Please. The judgment is passed before your child’s feet have touched the ground: it’s all in the way you gave birth to them.
A spectacularly stupid story recently ran in several newspapers, claiming that “demanding middle-class mothers” are behind the rising caesarean birth rate. The Royal Free hospital in north London, these newspapers gasped, delivers 28% of babies by C-section. “Some women do opt for a caesarean section because they can’t cope with the uncertainty,” Louise Silverton, director for midwifery at the Royal College of Midwives tutted. “They control the rest of their lives, but they can’t control labour.”
Given that the national rate for C-sections is 26.2%, this is barely an anecdote, let alone a news story. Even besides a failure to mention the rising age of women giving birth and the growing size of newborns – two factors that play a significant part – nobody specifies how many caesareans at the hospital were emergency, thus insinuating that any woman whose baby risks dying without medical intervention is a laughable bossyboot. In other words, it is nonsense pretending to be science, misogyny dressed up as fact.
This is how you know we have hit peak decadence: not by the number of C-sections women are having, but by people denigrating successful births. In the vast main, people in the developed world no longer have to worry about mother and infant mortality. But instead of celebrating this medical triumph, people fuss over what a woman’s “birth experience” says about her. My personal feeling about that is this: if you want an experience, go to Disneyland. If you want a healthy baby, do whatever works.
This is a notoriously sensitive subject. Last year I wrote about the current fetishisation of so-called natural childbirth, and I got more angry correspondence than when I wrote about Israel – pretty much all from women furiously arguing the superiority of the experience of natural births. Perhaps it’s because mothering causes so much self-doubt: the one thing you can be certain of is how you gave birth – and the best way to validate that is to denigrate other people’s choices. This is a damn shame, because if ever a subject should bring women closer together, it’s childbirth.
People have been saying stupid stuff to me about C-sections for decades. When I was 14, a cloth-brained therapist suggested I was anorexic because I’d been born by C-section, and therefore “never fought through the birth canal and so always looked for the easy way out”. (“This is easy?” I thought, literally fainting from starvation.) The day before my twins were due, six months ago, my partner and I went to a local market. “Don’t let them cut them out of you!” a fruitseller bellowed at me, as though hospitals were rife with child-catchers wielding scythes.
There is nothing – nothing – wrong with C-sections. Yes, they carry risks but, guess what? So does natural childbirth. I get why the NHS would like caesareans to be less popular: they’re more expensive than natural and home births (although nearly every woman I know who’s aimed for a home birth has ended up having an emergency C-section). But that is very different from inferring there is something wrong with the procedure itself. What is bad, is making an exhausted, hormonal new mother feel like she failed because she didn’t give birth vaginally. As a spokesperson from the British Pregnancy Advisory Service said to me last week, “The correct annual number of C-sections is the same as the correct number of abortions: it’s however many women want and need.”
Let’s deal with that want issue. Elective C-sections come in for particularly bad press – “too posh to push” and the rest. This disapproval comes not out of concern for the mother and baby, but from sanctimony mixed with snobbery. A woman’s reasons for wanting a C-section – anxiety, previous birth trauma – are dismissed by the same people who talk so passionately about the importance of the “birth experience”. It is extraordinary how tenacious the belief still is, that mothers prove how devoted they are by how much they are willing to suffer.
Against the fruitseller’s considered medical advice, I had a C-section – not because I had twins, but because I wanted one, and I am lucky to live in a time when I can choose what works for me. And it did: of the “experience” I recall pretty much nothing, but the two bellowing babies I held at the end of it changed my life for ever.
A woman doesn’t prove she’s going to be a good mother by how many stitches her vagina requires after the birth. If only it were that easy.
