Birth-Bonding-Death

This is a typical sampling of the week’s birth related news: In Australia there is an intense debate about home birth raging which intensified after a leading home birth activist delivered a stillborn baby; a recent study of 530,000 women in the Netherlands has confirmed that planned home births for low-risk pregnant people is just as safe as hospital birth; and there continue to be reports from detained immigrants about the inhumane treatment they suffer during childbirth in detention.

To me, this pile of interlocking and contradictory information is what keeps me up and night and gets me up in the morning. I think there is something systemic that connects all of these stories. The simple answer is misogyny - a hatred of women that makes their treatment, particularly during childbirth, dissonant (and I choose the word dissonant because it evokes the ringing in my ears and the pain in my gut that these stories elicit in diverse and contradictory ways). But misogyny alone is an unsatisfying answer: it is one of those gooey human problems that is hard to fix.  And, even if misogyny, racism, and capitalism are at the core of the problem, I am still interested in dissecting it to the point that we can see its inner workings like the intricate gears of a watch.

One of those little gears, is the idea of risk.

Toss these three balls in the air and start juggling: 1) a home birth activist and midwife talks to the media late in pregnancy about her plans to birth without an attendant and her baby ends up dying at birth, 2) a scientific study measures the risk of death or serious illness to mother or baby of low-risk women who delivered at home with a midwife or in a hospital with a midwife, 3) a pregnant immigrant is considered such a risk to civil society (due to her race? her questionable morality and respect for law and order?) that she is shackled while in labor.

What is risk?  In the first story risk has to do with infant mortality.  The underlying message is that the home birth midwife killed her baby by being irresponsible - that greater conformity to mainstream ideas might have saved her, and that being so brashly in opposition to the mainstream is in itself risky, maybe even deadly, and certainly worthy of our disgust.

In the second, risk also has to do with mortality but in stark contrast to the Australian midwife’s story it is measured, reasoned, scientific.  Here, risk has less to do with disgust and more to do with odds, numbers, and tidy categories like “low risk women.”  I almost prefer disgust because its fleshy enough to hold onto, while the disgust latent in the scientific study is hard to pin down.

In fact, I am confident that many, many people whose pro-homebirth ideas I share would jab me in the side for questioning the value of this redemptive study.  But to me that’s just the problem - we need redemption? I know home birth is a good option, but not because it’s tidy or safe.  It’s a good option to me, because it’s more alive (and we will always be disappointed by efforts to eschew death).

Which is what leads me to the final story, the immigrant women, detained, imprisoned, pregnant.  Risky.  Right?  The risk that these women supposedly pose to society is the same as the perceived risk taken by the Australian midwife, and the same as the risk sought to be carefully eliminated by the tidy confines of the scientific study. It is the risk of being out of conformity, control, beyond regulation and management: it is the risk of life.  Life, that so brazenly continues through the industrial revolution, past modernity, and into cyber-space to be ALIVE and irrevocably wedded to death.

Which reminds me of that line from Kushner’s Angels in America (a great survey of life/death and politics that we could look to for lessons) “We can’t just stop. We’re not rocks — progress, migration, motion is…it’s what living things do.”

These are exactly the flaming torches that I will be juggling in this blog: jotting little notes about the burns, the thrills, and what emerges from the ashes, in an attempt to envision an architecture of life that is more humane.