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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Give me drugs!
What's so feminist about a painful childbirth?
By Nina Shapiro
[08/03/99]

Cut me open!
I just had my second scheduled Caesarean and, yes, I still consider myself a feminist.
By Jean Hanff Korelitz
[08/02/99]

Hot Flash
Blood brothers
Cary and Steven Stayner were connected by violence. One is a murderer. The other, a victim, is remembered by a childhood friend.
By Sarah Beach
[07/30/99]

Hot Flash
Gay marriage in the Methodist Church
The Rev. Don Fado has put his ministry on the line for homosexual rights. "I wasn't being disobedient," he says. "The church was disobedient, losing sight of what it's meant to be."
By Suzanne Marmion
[07/29/99]

The pits
Summertime and the living would be easy -- if women didn't have to shave or wax constantly.
By Mei Yan Leung
[07/28/99]

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The safest place to have a baby, I remember reading once, was the back seat of a car. My doctor told me I was crazy when I said I was planning a homebirth. "Sure, if everything goes right you could have your baby on a beach," he said cryptically. In retrospect, perhaps that's exactly where I should have gone. I might have chosen to do what the other animals do and crawl away to a secret corner of the woods to have a good scream for three days if the option were available; barring that, I thought I'd do my grunting at home.

I was part of the 1 percent of birthing women in the United States confident enough in my own body, or scared enough at what hospitals would do with it, to make the choice of having my baby in the bedroom. I'd expected my homebirth to give me a more personalized, more supportive, calmer, less interventionist, simpler, happier experience than what I would get in a hospital. You hear all the talk of water babies delivered by naked papas; homebirth, I assumed, could be customized like a new car. Midwives, I supposed, would have fewer rules -- and could bend what rules they had to fit the circumstances. The final moment of ecstasy, I figured, would happen under the loving gaze of friends and family, and the newborn boy would spring into the arms of my partner, who would embrace the goo as he placed the child on my breast.

What I didn't know is that midwifery has come a long way since the early '70s, when Ina May Gaskin, the matriarch of the contemporary homebirth movement, rambled across the country in a spiritual Partridge Family bus, delivering babies in parking lots. I'd read a story from a tattered 1973 issue of "The Realist" by Raven Lang, another founder of the homebirth movement, describing mythic flower-power births in which fresh fruit juices and hash helped the laboring mother along.

Get me to the hospital, give me drugs, cut me open! Give me drugs! What's so feminist about a painful childbirth? Cut me open! I just had my second scheduled Caesarean and, yes, I still consider myself a feminist.

I wasn't really hoping to sneak in a bong hit during my labor, but I did want to avoid the dangerous "prophylactic" measures -- antibiotics, IVs, episiotomies -- that hospitals dump on patients to fend off lawsuits. I had definitely been turned off by my first tour of the HMO hospital: a peach path through suburban anxieties. The kindly nurse who led us through the Level III facility kept bragging about the many layers of security that were going to prevent us from having our baby stolen. Then there were the mishap stories one always hears: an anesthesiologist who put in an epidural and was somehow an hour's drive away when the anesthesia wore off; a baby whom a hospital pediatrician mistakenly diagnosed as having his stomach "on the wrong side," engendering a battery of unnecessary X-rays. I had started out with a conventional OB-GYN, but had grown increasingly frustrated with five-minute physician visits and ongoing rounds of blood work-ups for conditions no one in my entire family history had ever known.

What I got instead from the world of homebirth were herbal teas and hour-and-a-half conversations along with the ongoing rounds of blood work-ups for conditions no one in my entire family history had ever known. These days ultrasounds have replaced bongs, and the wide-eyed and untrained have moved on to the "unassisted childbirth" movement.

And yes, I know they call it "homebirth," but to tell you the truth, it was never really my home we were gathering in. Every couple of weeks my boyfriend and I ambled down to a cozy suburban cottage with a quaint backyard and built-in family. Appointments with my midwife had a reassuring routine. "Tea?" she'd ask. "Yes, thanks," we'd respond. There might be a slice of pie. Then, as the bleeps of a boy playing video games punctuated the background and a husband popped in or out, we'd talk emotions, get a fetal heartbeat and eventually be on the road.

Unless, of course, my health actually came up. Then the appointments involved a different routine -- one epitomized by the rainy Monday, 41 weeks into my pregnancy, when I left the tea bags and chitchat because I was instructed to head directly to the hospital for some tests, with the caution that I might have to get induced that day. We quickly and dejectedly packed our bags and headed for a very unplanned C-section. But when we got to the dreaded hospital, instead of being greeted by officious health professionals ready to straitjacket the wayward homebirth couple, it was a calm, nonchalant staff who gave me tests, a tour of the facility, and warmly invited me to come back -- even as they sent me home with the unexpected label "normal."

It wasn't the first midwife-inspired birth scare of the pregnancy followed by comforts of medicine's more conventional wing; it wouldn't be the last. Would my baby be born at 13 pounds with the shoulders of a linebacker, as my midwife once worried? Would my increasingly variable blood pressure send me into a state of shock? Was my one-week-overdue infant wrinkling and shriveling with the last teaspoons of amniotic fluid? Tests generally confirmed "no" -- and the tea bags would once again be offered. But that's the schizophrenic world of midwifery as I experienced it -- dictums to relax while drawing up detailed maps, in triplicate, of worst-case scenarios and how to transport ourselves to the hospital. Was it any wonder my blood pressure only seemed to be rising when my midwife was measuring it?

I could only laugh at the question that came up over and over again from well-meaning relatives and slightly concerned friends -- "Is homebirth safe?" To that I could only answer: "Perilously so."

Next page | I wanted nature to take its course, but my midwife wanted nature to take her course