I was linked to a website, BirthLove, through a Facebook friend. It is an absolutely amazing resource. I haven't yet read everything on there because there is, quite simply, WAY too much on this site to be read in one day while also playing with a toddler, feeding a toddler, dealing with meals... It is a very prolific site. Amongst their contributors are Gloria Lemay - one of Canada's best known and respected birth attendants - and Marsden Wagner - former director of Women's and Children's Health with the WHO - as well as Gretchen Humphries - I've linked to her site in the 'Resources' sidebar - and Sarah Buckley - a mother and writer from New Zealand.
One article recently really jumped out at me from the site. It's entitled Rape of the Twentieth Century. It is a shockingly honest and brutal portrayal of the sadly-common tragedy of unpleasant hospital births. The author begins with a description of her five hospital births, each one a broken birth, a birth in which her choices and her body were treated with disregard and disrespect. She describes how her body and her births were used as teaching tools, rather than treated with honour and sanctity, how unnecessary and unwarranted procedures were performed on her and her unborn children "in the name of science". It is a harrowing tale.
She goes on to discuss the interventions used in medicalized births and many of their untold risks: the use of episiotomy motivates heavy suctioning to clear the infant's lungs, and poses the possibility of cutting the baby, forceps can disfigure women's genitals, caesarean section increases the likelihood of maternal death by a factor of sixteen. And as the author writes:
In a cesarean section, a private, secret, and sensual event becomes a sterile crucifixion in a room full of slicing, staring strangers. And the ultimate rape is that we are told we need to be cut. The sanctity and power of birth becomes a meek "yes, doctor" and we become spectators to our own violation; we even thank the doctors as they scurry on their way out of the operating room.
Her description of medicalized birth is unforgiving and cuts deeply, but she writes as one who has had more experience with hospital births than is average. Five hospital births. Five births which left her alone and weeping. Five births in which she felt her body a failure, defective and incapable.
She argues strongly in favour of homebirth and midwifery, not purely because it is so pleasant, it is so simple, but because hospital births truly do pose such a grave risk. It is a risk not only of undesired intervention or surgery, not only of dissatisfaction, but one of deep and abiding sadness at what has been lost, and of avoidable death.
We are living in strange and savage times. This century will be remembered as one of war and genocide; and violent, coercive childbirth. Birth is weeping, and bleeding. We are made to believe we must give birth in sometimes hostile and mostly indifferent hospitals, where interference with a woman's natural birthing rhythms is the norm. Our vaginas can be stared at and cut by strangers, and abnormal emotional and physical behaviors- such as excessive fear, crying, and stress-induced stoppage of labor- have become normal and expected. Babies are routinely harmed; and the perpetrators are exalted as life savers, instead of reviled as child abusers. A birth without unnecessary intervention is now unusual, even though we all have the potential to birth beautifully- if only left alone.
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