Few things drive the British press quite so demented as the thought of a pregnant woman with a choice. Illegal immigrants eating swans? This week’s most dangerous woman in Britain? Mere side issues to the spectre of horror that is a pregnant woman making a decision about what suits her best as an individual. An individual! After all, we know that as soon as conception happens, a woman stops being her own person but is instead generic “mum”, and should be talked to accordingly.
But I’m getting ahead of myself here (typical bloody woman). “Mothers ‘risk losing ability to give birth’” screamed the front of the Sunday Times last weekend. Various other papers eagerly seized on the story, too, based on the latest book from French doctor Michel Odent, who claims that because childbirth has become so medicalised, women are no longer able to go through it without intervention. Odent writes that the use of synthetic drips of oxytocin means women will no longer be able to produce “the hormone of love” naturally. That’s right, women: not only are you foolishly allowing doctors to divest you of your ability to give birth, but you soon won’t even love the few kids you manage to produce. You disgust me, women.
Odent, a passionate advocate for birthing rooms and water births, has long been a fascinating character, but he also exemplifies the problem in discussions about childbirth. There is a terrific section in American comedian Amy Poehler’s recent memoir, Yes Please, in which she writes that when she was pregnant she learned the way to deal with people insisting the only way to have a baby was a home birth was to say, “Good for you! Not for me.” Odent, like too many people who talk on this issue, is not a fan of the “Good for you! Not for me” approach. Rather, it’s his (non-medicalised) way or doomsday.
Tellingly, Odent cites the lengthening time of women’s labours, saying that labour now lasts 150 minutes longer than it did for women who gave birth between 1959 and 1966. But labour times are not the only thing that have changed in the past half-century; women have too. They are having children later, and fewer of them, and the babies themselves are getting bigger. These are just some factors that might have a lot more to do with changing labour time (and, for that matter, medical intervention) than women de-evolving from the ability to give birth.
Only last month, this paper ran a front-page story with the headline quoting the World Health Organisation: “Caesarean sections should only be done out of medical necessity”. It included the tutting figure that the percentage of births in this country by caesarean section has increased since 1990 from 12% to 25%. This reflects a worldwide increase, and is thought to be the result of “a combination of doctors believing surgery is safer in potentially difficult births and women choosing not to undergo labour”, neither of which sounds much like a terrible cause. “More research,” the WHO said, “on the impact of caesarean sections on women’s psychological and social wellbeing is still needed.” I’d also be interested in research on the impact on these same women when their birthing choices are being judged.
It is quite something to watch how what is erroneously described as “natural childbirth” – as though childbirth involving medical intervention is fake, or “lesser” – has shifted from being an option feminists promoted in the 1960s to help free women from the male-dominated atmosphere of hospitals, to being yet another stick with which to accuse women of being insufficiently self-sacrificing as mothers.
As anyone who has been to a certain kind of pre-natal “support group” knows, for a woman to say – admit, even – that she will avail herself of all the pain relief and opt for a c-section is tantamount to admitting you plan to give your kids heroin to keep them quiet during EastEnders. The attitude in these groups is truly something to behold, with women being berated for opting for a birth plan that involves anything more sophisticated than giving birth in a woodland attended to only by twinkly-eyed foxes.
Childbirth is not the only area where progress is condemned as detrimental – the anti-vaccination movement has some room to shout here too – but it is certainly among the most emotive, and front-page headlines that exploit these fears are spectacularly unhelpful.
Yes, women can be oversensitive when it comes to discussions about childbirth and parenting – when comments like “I don’t know how you work and raise children” sound to a tired mother’s ears more like “I don’t know how you can bear to leave your children to go to the office!” But people really do talk the most astonishing load of cobblers on these subjects.
This week Germaine Greer claimed that IVF has “deconstructed” something she described as “the concept of motherhood”. Yes, God save the sanctified concept of motherhood! This theoretical idea is surely worth valuing more than, say, actual parenthood, for which IVF has been such a boon, allowing millions of men and women to become the parents they long to be. Greer added that because Elton John’s husband, David Furnish, is named as the mother on the birth certificate of their sons, “motherhood has emptied out”. I can’t help but feel that Greer doesn’t have much respect for “the concept of motherhood” herself if she honestly feels it can be destroyed by Furnish.
Contrary to how it’s often depicted in the press, there is nothing of the “cheats option” to a c-section, unless you count being sliced in half as a walk in the park. Childbirth is not a lifestyle statement but a temporary state where the goal is to get out a healthy baby who has a healthy, happy mother to look after it, and whether that’s achieved through c-section or by giving birth under a rainbow, then it’s all for the good.
The self-indulgent veneration in the media today of “natural childbirth” is downright offensive in a world where women still die every day because they don’t have access to different childbirth options. “Good for you! Not for me” should be the cry of pregnant women everywhere. But of course, that suggests they’ve made a conscious choice about themselves as individuals – and as we know, that is just not on.
