For someone who doesn’t want kids, I certainly have an abiding interest in pregnancy and childbirth. This book was mentioned in Misconceptions, and it sounded interesting, so I decided to check it out. When picking it up at the library, I felt obligated to tell the librarian “it’s not what you think” when she glanced curiously at my stomach.

Anyway, I thought that this book was really interesting. As I told my friend Sarah, not having had/planning to have children, I don’t feel qualified to speak on the topic, and I certainly wouldn’t tell another woman how to have her baby, but I would definitely recommend this book. There was a lot of really intriguing information, including some things that I assume would be helpful for expecting mothers to know, if you can get over the kind of wooshy, touchy-feely parts.

One thing about the book that was really neat was the survey of the history of childbirth, and the rise of the use of medical intervention. Why are laboring women encouraged to lie on their backs, when this position is pretty much awful for labor/delivery? Because that’s how the medical establishment decided it needed to be in the 1800s. Why are women forced to adhere to a labor and delivery schedule? So that OBs can go home at five. Why are women given pain management drugs, even if they interfere with labor and delivery? Because pain is “abormal” and “bad.”

I’ve always thought that childbirth is a pretty natural process, and that while there certainly may be cases in which medical intervention is critically needed, for the most part, women can probably handle it with the support of friends and a qualified midwife (like they do in the rest of the world). Only in the United States do we have this birth-industrial complex which dictates every aspect of labor and delivery with the expectation that the process can be fitted to a plan, even though every woman’s body is totally different.

We also live in a country where physicians are terrified of making mistakes, and I think that probably feeds into the whole thing. It’s hard to have a natural childbirth if you work with a doctor who is afraid of being sued, and hard to dictate the terms of a birth plan which meets your needs in a facility with specific rules about how birth is handled.

I also really loved the photographs in this book, documenting a wide variety of labor and delivery practices. One of the saddest images was from the 1970s: a young black woman, alone, trapped in a hospital bed flat on her back. Apparently it was (and still is, in some places) standard practice to basically chain women down and leave them alone while they were in labor. How horrifying.

Demographics:

Immaculate Deception II, by Suzanne Arms. Published 1996, 290 pages. Health.