Something interesting is happening in birth: Part II

As I said, something interesting is happening in birth.  That interesting thing is that birth has now, seemingly suddenly, become interesting.

I spend a lot of time on the internet.  A shocking amount of time, actually.  One of the few benefits of having a child who still nurses, oh, at least 15 times a day, is that I certainly have an excuse to sit on my couch and do some surfing (though it does make typing difficult sometimes, hence the several days it's been since my last post).  I read a lot of blogs, and spend a great deal of my time on Facebook looking at birth-related groups and following links posted by other women (thank you, Emma!).  I think it's fair to say that about 75 percent of my time on the internet is in some way birth, pregnancy and parenting related.  Because so much of my time is spent on topic-specific sites, though, I wasn't sure that the trend I was perceiving was actually real, and not just the result of the lens through which I view the media.  That trend is toward a general interest in birth-related topics.

Birth blogs are many.  I just Googled "birth blog" and got 60.5 MILLION hits.  Yes, MILLION.  Well past the first 50 pages of hits, the links are still largely to blogs about birthing, birth stories, or pregnancy and birth blogs.  For women and couples who are pregnant, it's to be expected that the topic might cross their minds.  For those of us who have birthed, who have experienced what birth is like in North America and who didn't like it, it's equally understandable that we'd find such a subject engaging. Likewise, those who are employed in the distressingly-termed "birth industry" would be expected to be interested in the subject of birth (one would hope, at least).  But the topic has always seemed somewhat sidelined to these demographics who are directly affected by the state of birth.  There have been books about birth, classes about birth and cheesily-produced movies about birth, but they were very much separated from the other books (Chapters shelves the pregnancy and birth books in the children's section) the other classes and the other movies (I dare you to go to Blockbuster and ask where their birthing dvds are located.  Go on: it'll be funny!).

Recently, though, there's been a shift.  Major media, news media, have started highlighting stories on birth topics.  Just this week, Fox's Detroit station aired a news feature on Marie Mongan's HypnoBirthing method of birthing.  It's a surprisingly pro-natural-birth story; rather than finding obstetricians to discuss the validity of such a technique, they instead interviewed an instructor as well as two women who have benefited from self-hypnosis.  Last week, Artvoice, a publication out of Buffalo, featured Getting Off Our Backs, an article about the midwifery model of care, homebirth, and how women are changing how they see and experience birth, as a cover story.  Late last month, The Huffington Post featured an article posted by sociologist Louise Marie Roth about the status of women in labour in which she referenced specific instances of births 'gone bad' so-to-speak, where birth choices by women resulted in legal action and the suspension of parental rights.  This wasn't her first post on the state of birth in America.  The New York Times' Home and Garden section online featured a slideshow of images and anecdotes on homebirth back in November 2008.  It's beautiful, it's inspiring, and it's very positive.

At the recent staging of Karen Brody's Birth in Ottawa, I was delighted to see that not every audience member was a woman, and that not all the women were mother's or birth practitioners.  There were single women present who had never given birth, and young couples who were not yet even expecting their first child.  But they were there, and they were interested.  During the Red Tent before the Saturday evening performance, many of us told our birth stories.  I was one of the very last mothers to recount her story, and I was inexpressibly excited to see such interest on the faces of those who had yet no personal encounter with birth.

We could discard this trend.  Who cares?  we could say.  It's a fad. Interests come and go: what difference does it make?  The difference is that with interest comes information.  The more people inform themselves, the more likely they are to demand change, to demand respect, to demand their rights and the rights of their babies.  The more women and men, mothers and fathers, stand up against a system that would have them lay down and lay still, the more likely that change will come, and sooner, too.  No mother or father should ever need to weep while acknowledging that their rights and the dignity of the mother's and baby's body were violated, and not just by one doctor or one hospital, but by an entire system.

I think it's interesting.  I think it's exciting.  It gives me hope.  Just as the world in which I grew up was a far, far different one from that in which my mother grew up - I never had to stage a protest in order to be allowed to wear trousers to school, but she did - I have great hope that my daughter will not have to fight so hard to have positive birth experiences should she choose to have children.  I have hope that her choices, her rights, and the sanctity of her body will be automatically respected and upheld.  I have hope that any births she may have in her future will be positive ones, as empowering and uplifting as any can be.

It can only come with change.  That change has already started.  And that is very, very interesting, indeed.