The Text
A Child is Born
Germaine Greer's essay on the cultural politics of childbirth.
01 Traditional Ways of Managing Childbirth
The ways of managing childbirth in traditional societies are many
and varied; their usefulness stems directly from the fact that they
are accepted culturally and collectively so that the mother does not
have the psychic burden of reinventing the procedures. Even though
the potential catastrophes are alive in the memory of her community
and the index of anxiety high, a ritual approach to pregnancy which
hems the pregnant woman about with taboos and prohibitions helps
make the anxiety manageable. A woman who observes all the
prohibitions and carries out all the rites will be actively involved
in holding the unknown at bay. She will have other reinforcements,
for many of the ritual observances of pregnancy involve the
participation of others who should support her, primarily her
husband, then her kinsfolk and then the other members of her
community. Some of these behaviours will be sensible and useful,
others magical, but they will all increase her sense of security and
her conviction that she is conducting the pregnancy, not that it is
conducting her.
The remnants of this kind of prophylaxis can be found in the
persistence of old wives' tales about pregnancy even in our own
superrational and confused lifestyle. One university graduate of my
acquaintance who approached her pregnancy as if it were her term
assignment, meticulously footnoting every development, clung to her
pre-natal exercises as a form of ritual observance as well as a
helpful preparation for the physical exploit of childbirth,
performing them in deep silence and total recollection at the same
time every day come hell or high water. As well, she observed the
old diehard superstition that acquiring equipment and apparel for
baby before the birth was bad luck, and so one of my godchildren
shot into the world without crib or napkins. Considerable effort had
gone into seeing that the mother had every opportunity to enjoy her
baby, but, after her training for unmedicated childbirth for months,
in the event the hospital refused to believe she was in second stage
labour until her daughter's head had appeared... The hospital staff
was so uncooperative about breast-feeding that mother and daughter
discharged themselves after two days.
02 Attended Birth
This birth was virtually unattended. In non-technocratic societies,
except for remarkable accidents, birth is always attended.
Clearly infant and mother mortality is greater in traditional
births, but in our anxiety to avoid death we may have destroyed the
significance of the experience for the vast majority who live.
No one would deny that each infant and particularly every maternal
death is a tragedy to be prevented if at all possible, nor that
modern obstetric care, which has developed in the hospital setting,
has been at least partly responsible for the dramatic decrease in
both maternal and pre-natal mortality over the past half century.
But it is not necessarily perverse to question whether our present
priority should be to reach minimum figures for perinatal mortality
at any price when this includes giving up things which free human
beings have often felt to be more important than their own survival
— such as freedom to live their own lives their own way and to make
individual choices in line with their own sense of values.
03 Marriage, Motherhood and the New Family
In many societies women still go forth from their mother's houses at
marriage to live with a mother-in-law and the wives of their
husbands' brothers. It is a truism of anthropology that such women
do not become members of their new family until they have borne a
child. If we consider that in such societies the marriage was quite
likely to have been arranged, it is understandable that the bride
too longs for the child who will stand in the same intimate
relationship to her as she with her own mother. The western
interpretation of such mores is that they are backward, cruel and
wrong; it is assumed that the sexual relations between the spouses
are perfunctory and exploitative and that all mothers-in-law are
unjust and vindictive.
One of the greatest difficulties in the way of feminists who are not
chauvinistic and want to learn from women who still live within a
female society is the tendency of those women to withdraw into
silent opposition when participating in international fora conducted
in languages which they cannot speak with fluency; women officials
of the Sudanese government told me that they had given up going to
international conferences, even though the trips were a tremendous
treat, because they were tired of being told about their own lives
instead of being consulted.
Thus we in the West would regard it as outrageous that a woman could
lose her own name and become known as the mother of her first-born,
once she has borne it — although of course most of us do not protest
against the sinking of the woman's lineage under her husband's name
at marriage. In many traditional societies the relationship between
mother and child is more important than the relationship between
husband and wife: in some, indeed, the child's relationship with the
rest of his family is as important or even more important than
either.
... a number of social usages may stress the child's relationship
with the rest of his kin-group at the expense of that with his
parents. His aunts and uncles may be permitted greater physical
intimacy with him in public than his parents. In many traditional
societies in Africa and India the biological family is deliberately
weakened, by enforced abstinence or actual separation of parents, in
order to strengthen the extended family — thus children are not born
at the whim of the parents, but in response to a broader pressure
from the whole group.
04 Celebrating Birth — A Sylheti Woman's
Account
The woman who satisfies the longings of her peers by producing the
child they are all anxious to see, finds her achievement celebrated
in ways that dramatise her success. Among the few first-person
accounts of how this works in practice is this one from a young
Sylheti woman:
If a girl is lucky, and her parents are alive, she goes to her
mother's house for the last few months of her pregnancy and about
the first three months of the baby's life. There she gets a lot of
love and care. She is asked, "What would you like to eat? What do
you fancy?" All the time she is looked after. The whole matter of
pregnancy is one of celebration. When the baby is born it is an
occasion of joy for the whole family. The naming ceremony is lovely.
It is held when the boy is seven days old. A new dress is brought
for it and a new sarif for the mother. There is feasting and singing
until late at night. The women and girls gather and sing songs.
Garlands of turmeric and garlic are worn to ward off evil spirits.
That's when the name is chosen... The ceremony is held for the birth
of a boy or a girl. Of course it is considered better to have a boy,
but the birth of a girl is celebrated with the same joy by the women
in the family. We sit together eating pan and singing. Some of us
might be young unmarried girls, others aged ladies of forty or
fifty. There are so many jokes, so much laughter.
— A Sylheti Woman
Among the rewards of pregnancy in this case, as in many others, is
that the woman gets to go home to visit her mother and sisters; the
nostalgic tone of the description, which is clearly tinged with
rose, may be the product of the contrast that this young woman finds
in England.
05 Rearing Children in Bangladesh
Another of the Asian women who found a voice in Amrit Wilson's book
gives a similarly rosy picture of rearing a child in Bangladesh:
In Bangladesh children under the age of five or six are looked after
by the whole family. All the children of the joint family are looked
after together. They are taken to the pond for a bath perhaps by one
daughter-in-law, and she bathes them all. Then they all come in and
sit down to eat. Perhaps the youngest daughter-in-law has cooked the
meal. Another woman feeds them. As for playing the children play out
of doors with natural objects. Here people say that Asian children
don't play with toys. In Bangladesh they don't need toys. They make
their own simple things... In the afternoon they love to hear
Rupthoka (fairy tales). Maybe there is a favourite aunt, she tells
them these stories. But at night when they get sleepy they always go
to their mothers and sleep in their embrace. But other women do help
a lot, in fact, they have such strong relationships with the child
that it is not uncommon for them to be called Big Mother or Small
Mother...
— An Asian Woman (from Amrit Wilson's Finding a Voice)
06 The Impact of Western Medicine
All technological change causes social problems; the impact of
Western medicine in traditional societies is one of the most
problematic areas of modernization. The prestige of the white-coats
is enormous, the respect for their miraculous hypodermics total. The
pressure of expectation makes for aggressive and dramatic procedures
even when the health status of the patients is too poor to withstand
them. Allopathic doctors in peasant communities are dependent upon
expensive drugs, sparkling equipment and lots of electricity, most
of which they have not got in sufficient quantity.
Where foreign aid has established that temple of our religion, the
hospital, it must make a ritual display of its power with horrible
results. Sheila Kitzinger visited an enormous modern hospital for
"Bantu patients" in South Africa, and this is what she saw:
The delivery ward was full of groaning, whirling women — the
majority labouring alone. Oxytocin drips and pumps were in
widespread use. This was the meeting-place of the old Africa and the
new technology of the West. Pools of blood lay on the floor like
sacrificial outpourings, and Bantu nurses were happy to leave them
there as a witness of the blessings of the earth, while they busied
themselves with technologically sophisticated modern equipment and
ignored the labouring women as far as possible, which it was not so
difficult to do as they did not speak the same languages anyway...
Birth was very far from normal here and it was conducted in such a
way that I had seen before in American hospitals catering for black
"clinic" patients from large urban ghettos: impersonal conveyor-belt
obstetrics accompanied by a plethora of technical innovations and
machinery.
— Sheila Kitzinger, Women as Mothers
07 Worse Fates Than Death
If we turn birth from a climactic personal experience into a
personal disaster, it matters little that the result is more likely
to be a live child. Women will not long continue to offer up their
bodies and minds to such brutality, especially if there is no one at
home to welcome the child, to praise the mother for her courage and
to help her raise it.
In fact peasant communities are more level-headed and sceptical of
us and our methods than we realise and they have resisted the
intrusion of our chromium-plated technology more successfully than
we like to think. They know that death attends too frequently in the
traditional birthplace, but they also know that there are worse
fates than death. Nevertheless, all that stops our technology from
reaching into every hut and hovel is poverty: the cultural hegemony
of Western technology is total.
The voices of a few women raised in warning cannot be heard over the
humming and throbbing of our machines, which is probably just as
well, for if we succeed in crushing all pride and dignity out of
child bearing, the population explosion will take care of itself.
