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n/a on 2/24/2008 1:53:56 AM |
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RE: The Business of Being Born |
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I saw this tonight and really found the best part of it was the discussion that followed. One member of the audience brought up a point that I have seen in other forums. This is what they said:
"I just don't think that a woman's empowerment is an argument for a home birth."
This made me really think more about it and I am not convinced it is about empowerment at all because the goal is not to empower a mother to become more powerful than her husband or her doctor or anyone else. She is asking only for her body and her baby to be treated with respect and kindness. The fact that she needs to ask for this speaks to her own recognition of her vulnerability, conscious or not. Because every mother during labor has only one thing on her mind – the safety of her baby. the baby is her Achilles' heel. More than anyone else in that room, she fears for the safety and life of her child. So much in fact, that she is willing to do just about anything for a guarantee that her child will be safe and whole, even sell her very soul. This is clearly the case as we watch woman after woman, educated and strong, armed with knowledge about birth and medical interventions, still agree to countless interventions. She willingly submits her body to being strapped down, to the most uncomfortable birthing positions, to painful intravenous lines and foley catheters. She agrees to Pitocin which causes abnormally painful contractions, knowing that this will hurt. She will even have her body cut open with a knife or mutilated with an episiotomy. She will do all these things despite any misgivings she has for one reason. Because she is willing to sacrifice herself for the false promise that her child will be safe.
Our job as a society is to protect her. Because, in the blink of an eye, she will throw herself needlessly in front of a bus to protect her child, we must prevent her from doing so. She must learn from us that the safety of her child lies not in false promises from technology and interventions but in herself. Only by doing this will the future of the child be safeguarded, because childbirth is not the destination. It is the beginning of a long journey during which a mother’s mettle will be tested countless times and she will need to believe in her own ability to parent effectively. It is in that singular moment during childbirth when she doubts herself and her ability, that a mother is either born or lost. So it is not about empowerment, but preservation. We must preserve a baby’s mother or neither has a future.
So my feeling is that, in a way, the term empowerment is detrimental to the birth advocacy movement. Thoughts?
Tienchin Ho |
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