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Give Birth Like A Man!

Give Birth Like A Man!

Last updated on: February 22, 2018 at 5:50 pm by Melinda Selmys

Give Birth Like A Man! 2018-02-22T17:50:43-04:00 Melinda Selmys

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I promised last time to write about the narratives that I’ve come up with for getting through birth, and how they’ve gone for me. There are basically two reasons for doing this. One is that on the few occasions where I’ve found women grappling with the process of birth from outside of a very typically feminine framework, I’ve found it helpful. For the most part, these stories haven’t really solidified into a complex narrative – but they’ve stilled helped.

The second is that gender-atypical women are often overwhelmingly reluctant to give birth. I suspect that at least a small part of this arises from the fact that they don’t see positive portrayals of pregnancy and birth that they’re able to relate to. Simply put, in order to see pregnancy as desirable we have to be able to picture it as something compatible with our own personalities. If the images that I have of pregnancy involve really girly looking women with bulging stomachs lying in pools of red silk, and nauseatingly sentimental photographs by Anne Geddes, I’m not likely to think “Yes! This is for me.”

So I’ve been pregnant nine times, and have given birth to 6 children. I’m currently in the process of getting ready to give birth to another and to be honest I’m still kind of casting around for a good inspiration for how to go about it this time. Things I’ve tried thus far:

Birth # 1. Classic

Classic unprepared medicalized birth in a hospital with a family doctor. Most of the birth stories that I’ve read from queer women kind of read like my first birth. Basically, you have no narrative. No birth plan. No idea what you’re doing. Then the baby comes. The medical environment is weird and alienating. There are various interventions that you didn’t want. But at the end you have a baby, and even though the experience sucked in a lot of ways you’re still kind of pumped about your body having been able to do this thing.

Birth # 2. Midwives

For my second, I had midwives. I don’t think I had a plan, apart from “give birth at my mother’s house” (our lease had expired, we weren’t able to renew it, and we were kind of looking for a place to live.) Any plan I might have had would have gone out the window because there were serious complications – my daughter’s cord was too short and she was in distress. My midwife was an old-school crusader – one of those women who did home births before it was legal in Ontario. She said “We have to call an ambulance. If it gets here before you give birth, they will stop labour and do a c-section. You’re only 8 cm dilated, and we have five minutes. This is going to hurt.” I mostly remember loudly declaring that I wanted to die, and failing death, a c-section would be okay because I couldn’t do this. But we did it. The baby was born as the ambulance attendants were coming down the stairs. I remember the attendants trying to convince me to go to the hospital and thinking “You stupid men. I just did the craziest thing in the world, and I won. Go away.” Two hours later, all of my male friends came over and we played Girl Talk. I have no recollection of why.

Birth # 3. in extremis

Following my second birth, I was deeply aware that I had made bad decisions (if you can call screaming “Kill me” a decision) as a result of being in unbearable agony. I’d reflected on that. Fortunately, my midwife had gone with my actual convictions rather than the preferences that I declared in extremis, but either way, there was a severe loss of self-determination. This unsettled me. I realized that that birth had been complicated, unusual, and I wanted to further investigate this relationship between extreme pain, the functioning of the rational intellect, and the ability to exercise free will. (All of this related, I’m sure, to my perennial fascination with the question of what it means, phenomenologically, to “break” under torture.) My plan was simple. I would repeat the Hail Mary mentally for as long as I could, and try to observe how pain interfered with my ability to consciously focus on a simple, repetitive thought. Eventually, I hit a point where the prayer started to break down, I couldn’t keep track of where I was in the sequence. This fragmentation of thought become increasingly severe, to the point where I couldn’t even get through the first line. Then there came a point where I was no longer capable of even retaining the intention to pray. I realized that I couldn’t hold to a fixed and determined course in the face of pain. This was a chilling challenge to my hard voluntaristic worldview: apparently, there was a point at which the will actually broke. Or…no. To talk about the will breaking was kind of the wrong way of looking at it. It was more like there was a point of agony where my freedom was simply suspended.

Birth # 4. Pain Killers

A mess. I don’t know that I had a plan apart from “get through it, somehow.” This is the only birth so far where I called for pain killers. The funny thing is, I didn’t ask for them until the baby was just about to crown and my midwife decided that she’d give me morphine to calm me down because it wouldn’t have time to hit the baby’s system before the baby was born. I remember it being instantly effective. My midwife insisted that this was a placebo effect – that I gave birth before the drugs would have actually kicked in.

Birth # 5. What would Rambo do?

This was the birth where I decided, formally, that I was going to rock it. During birth # 4 I’d been in the hospital, and there had been a lounge where women in early labour could watch movies. They were all things like “The Miracle of Birth” and “9 Months.” I was like “Where’s the Clint Eastwood?” So since this one was a homebirth, I figured I would get ready by watching Rocky. My birth plan was to march triumphantly into the den of pain, knock it on its ass, and bring back a baby. This worked amazingly well, except that it went super fast and my husband was freaking out because it wasn’t clear whether the midwife would get there before the baby did. I wasn’t worried about that. I figured, What Would Rambo Do? Birth the baby himself, and cut the cord with his teeth, obviously. I could do that. When the midwife did arrive she told me I needed to slow down or I would tear, but there was just no way. I was already committed to getting-‘er-done.

Birth # 6. Stoic birth

So birth # 5 was pretty awesome, but it still bothered me that when the midwife gave me instructions I couldn’t actually follow them. Yes, I had managed to set my will on a particular trajectory, and yes, I had maintained that trajectory beautifully through the worst of the pain. But my goal was to give birth without losing control. So this time I prepared by reading Stoic philosophy for three months before the birth, and practicing it more or less religiously in order to work out the kinks involved in modifying the traditional Roman practices to meet the demands of postmodern Catholic feminism. (My central concern was that Stoicism is ill-equipped to deal with the Other except as an “external,” whereas birth should ideally involve an intersubjective communion with the one who is birthed.) The actual labour integrated a variety of techniques: I talked to the baby during early labour, explaining to him what was going to happen, and how it was going to hurt, and how the pain was actually a good thing. I did a lot of singing which slowly transitioned into screaming, and I played with the different ways of using vibration to manipulate pain and move it around inside of my body. Every time I felt a contraction coming on, I would welcome it as “Sister Pain” and ask her to be helper in the work of giving life. Apart from that, I mostly let my body do what it wanted. And when the midwife said “Okay, little pushes, this is a really big baby we need to slow down,” I did. It was a kind of weird experience, because I’d basically managed to achieve the Stoic ideal of sufficiently detaching the Reason/Will from the body that it becomes possible to maintain a kind of radical equilibrium even in the face of extreme physical suffering.

So after six attempts I managed to pull off my philosophical dream birth. Now I have no idea what I’m going to do this time. I guess I could just go for a repeat performance, but that seems dull. In any case, whether I figure it out or not, the baby is going to come. I’ll let you know afterwards how it went.

Image: It came from pixabay.

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December 18, 2015

Queer Issue: Telling the Story of Labour and Birth Outside of Traditional Femininity

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