Yesterday was International Women’s day (…yay… we get a day…) and a birth story I read online triggered my 2 a.m. brain squirrels into frantic activity. The birth story was very typical, induction of labor that lead to cesarean section. The high cesarean rate in the United States, whether by design or enculturation, serves as both a reinforcement of the “woman as vessel” meme and as a fundamental engine of women’s disempowerment.
First off, women are enculturated with the belief that motherhood is the end-all and be-all of female existence and that by achieving that end, fulfillment is hers. How a woman feels about being a mother is completely beside the point, she is one, here we cue the Hail Mary Assumption (Sherri S Tepper): “…the assumption that all women are equipped with a stong, overriding maternal instinct; that all babies arouse this maternal instinct; and that any woman who does not respond maternally is a rotten person who must be guilty as sin…” Second, it does not matter HOW our children got here, women are to simply be grateful that they ARE here, no other emotional considerations need apply, tyvm.
First to that latter point, HOW our children get here IS important and it CAN color our relationships with them and the world around us. I know from personal experience, as a mom who had a c-section with my first child, that though I loved my daughter with all that I was, there was something off. The cause of her surgical entrance into the world was a condition called “deep transverse arrest”, basically, she was stuck facing left after not having fully rotated around to where she needed to be in order to be born. It was mostly just one of those damned things and perhaps, had I been encouraged to be up and moving around, she would have been born normally. Point being, I came away from the experience feeling my body betrayed me or the medical system betrayed me and kept me from doing something that women are supposed to do naturally. How could this happen to me, the daughter of a woman who gave birth 6 times from 1949 to 1965? I have long felt a pall over that birth experience, just not knowing what might have happened had I been in different place and time with different caregivers. I always had the old fall back of “I have a healthy baby”… the same words that most women say. And while the c-section can truly be a lifesaving surgery for mothers and babies, the skyrocketing number of them is an illustration of the baseline cultural distrust of women and their bodies, as well as a fundamental betrayal of that trust. It also serves to step up a woman’s status as an incubator or mere vessel, her emotions are shunted aside and she is told she must be happy since she has a healthy baby. If you aren’t joyful, you are considered to have something wrong with you. Of course, any woman’s response to a c-section varies with the number of women who have them, but there is a nearly universal denial that she should feel badly at all… she has her fulfillment, that baby… that is what she was here for in the first place, right. The baby is the prize, the gold ring… so why isn’t she happy?
I know in my own personal story, I didn’t realize I was depressed. I didn’t start processing the anger and resentment from my first birth until I was pregnant a second time and working with an incredible midwife. That event set my life on a new course. I became a stronger woman when I learned of the power and strength that I had within myself. With my daughter I was delivered of, while I GAVE BIRTH to my son.
That is an important distinction, at least for me. In not only c-sections, but the American way of birth in general, the power of women to GIVE BIRTH, her ACTIVE role is taken away or diminished. (Again this is not to say that medical intervention is never necessary or that every woman should have a home birth). However, women of childbearing age 98% of the time cede their personal power, their intuition, and emotional wellbeing to “experts” rather than being allowed real choices in childbirth which include midwives, doulas, home births, birthing centers, etc.
As my midwife said to me once, “If you don’t know your choices, you don’t have any.”