A friend who read my blog came away with the impression that I think the experience of birth is more important than the outcome, meaning that I would advocate for risky but meaningful births, or deny that death is worth avoiding.
This is a common misperception. More than just wrong, it expresses the limitations of this culture’s understanding of birth as a dangerous impediment to life.
To some birth might be good, it might be bad, it might be traumatic, it might be empowering, but at the end of the day if birth results in a mother and child who survive, it is successful. In my experience as a labor doula, this is an attitude I witnessed all the time in the hospital from nurses, doctors, anesthesiologists, and family members.
In this understanding of birth, survival is success and labor is the inherently risky passage that stands between the life promised by pregnancy and the intact bodies delivered at its end.
In many places around the world birth IS dangerous, many women die and even more are injured in ways that compromise their lives. The United Nations Human Rights Council just adopted a resolution recognizing maternal death and illness as a human rights issue.
Some would interpret this tragedy as evidence that survival ought to be the top priority, that because labor is an inherently risky passage anything that minimizes that risk is better than the riskiness of labor unchecked.
I agree that women are needlessly suffering and dying as a result of childbirth. But instead of locating the tragedy in the natural process of women’s bodies, I locate the tragedy in poverty and the devaluation of women’s lives. This devaluation is cultural, religious, economic, interpersonal, internal - pervasive.
Anything that fails to address the pervasive devaluation of women’s lives is the real tragedy. This is why I cannot agree that any birth that results in survival is a success, or that survival should be the exclusive top priority.
To survive in a context where your existence is disparaged, where you have no options, where your body is valued only to the extent that it can be used, is also a tragedy.
And this tragedy is reinforced when labor is viewed as the inherently risky passage that stands between the life promised by pregnancy and the intact bodies delivered at its end. In this view, women’s bodies are still valued as a means to an end, and this risky passage is cut away from women as if diseased. This kind of cultural surgery might promote survival, but it does not affirm life, especially women’s lives.
To illustrate the difference between what is survival and what is life affirming, a story about mountain climbing:
Next year my dad turns 60, and to celebrate he wants to climb the highest mountain in Colorado. My eight year old son is already planning to join us, he knows that I climbed one of the most challenging 14ers in Colorado when I was his age.
I get choked up thinking about him on that mountain next summer, challenged to his core, challenged at a level he can’t even conceive of yet. I think about his little body, about the large and unforgiving mountain, about the very real riskiness of his ascent. And I realize that inviting his participation is not risking his life, but affirming it. By inviting him to do something challenging, something hard but beautiful, I renew my commitment to him, my belief in his wholeness, his capacity for and worthiness of life.
This is a gift that my dad gave me when I was eight and over again in many ways throughout my life. Climbing Longs Peak in the middle of the night as an eight year old is inherently risky. And yes, I survived, but in that risky passage I was more alive than I had ever been. The hike taught me the difference between life and survival, taught me that I was powerful, profoundly vulnerable and ultimately capable.
During labor, I had a similar sense of perspective: I felt terribly vulnerable and at the same time immeasurably important. I was excrutiatingly aware that I could die, and that this life that pregnancy promised was more of a hope than a guarantee.
I did survive. And so did that beautiful baby. But I was ready and willing to die for the journey, just as I have been time and again on the face of a mountain. The journey is life.
And when women’s lives are valued, labor offers itself as a life affirming inherently risky journey that’s an honor to be be invited to consider. We don’t need childbirth to experience this fullness of life, but it’s here, built into the landscape like the glory of those snow-capped peaks that make no guarantees.
Childbirth, like the landscape, can be unforgiving and harsh, or it can be empowering and fulfilling. Much of this depends on the terms of engagement. For many women in the world, birth is not an opportunity, but a requirement mandated by custom, religion, and biology. 
Today, in the United States despite infant and maternal health statistics that leave a lot to be desired, most women and babies survive. Some survive because of intervention during that risky passage called birth, but most survive because they have been able to escape the crushing impact of poverty on the bodies of women and children.
Instead of having a cultural understanding of poverty and the devaluation of women as risky, we have a cultural understanding of birth as risky. And somehow, instead of understanding that our distance from poverty and our access of our human rights is what promotes our survival, we have an understanding that our ability to intervene in labor is what promotes our survival.
This places the blame for death on women’s bodies, and also ends up making it seem as though impoverished women and families were to blame for their own suffering.
Instead, as the U.N. finally recognizes, when women die and are injured as a result of childbirth it is a human rights issue. Yes, we should protect the bodies of women, yes, survival is an important condition of life. We should do what we can to honor the lives of women, as my father has. The journey of childbirth should be an invitation first and foremost. When it is it can also be a celebration of our power and vulnerability, indeed, a true celebration of life.
When I talk about the experience of childbirth it is not meant to take pregnancy out of context, but rather, to insist on its context.
When I talk about seeing the sunrise from the keyhole on Long’s Peak it is made all the more beautiful because of the context; I have chosen to participate in the beauty of life, I am small, the mountain is large, my body aches, and I am grateful.
When we take birth out of context - where the passage of labor is an inherently risky opportunity to be affirmed, acknowledged, valued, and capable - real damage is done not only to survival, but more importantly, to life.
Limitations. I am struck by that. How have we settled upon survival?
Trancending limitations is the call. The alterations to our nervous system are underway! How can we LIVE and EXPAND and TRANSFORM? And it seems birth is a beautiful place to start embracing that surviving does not equal thriving.
And yet, it seems a luxury of class to revel in possibility and expansion… I wonder how can I close the gap, eliminate and understand distance, foster connection to/with/among?
Thanks for sparking my wonder Indra.
beautiful, well put
nice!
When I was in Chicago a few weeks ago, I was talking with my sister - you know, the pediatrician about to head into pediatric hematology/oncology - about what she had learned since she started her medical education and especially her residency, what sense she can make of it all, you know, being bombarded daily by sick and injured children. She said the biggest lesson she has arrived at is that she really doesn’t think her work makes that much of a difference. Now, typing that out might come across much different than how she meant it. It wasn’t cynical, it was loving. It was theological. She meant to acknowledge that she was there to do everything possible that her training had taught her to do, and then to accept lovingly that the outcome was beyond her control - and really wasn’t the point.
From a theological and ethical perspective, this is the difference between making choices teleologically or phenomenologically. Are we driven in life based on its potential ends (telos), or are we experiencing life as an ongoing, multi-dimensional, contradictory, yet utterly wholeness of be-ing (phenomenology).
Mujerista theologian, Ada Maria Isazi-Diaz asks us to consider that la vida es la lucha. We are not fighting for an ends, but rather our job is to love and live in the fight. It’s a really hard thing to accept, I think - especially for those of us who have been repeatedly told to be goal-oriented, to achieve. But I am coming to believe that this is not life. Life is not about getting “there.” You know, there is no there there!
Your reflections here also remind me of one of my favorite quotes on hopelessness. I don’t have it here in front of me so I’m going to have to get home and then post it. But generally, it attempts to acknowledge that perhaps the best thing we can do is to accept that our work may not actually achieve anything in our lifetimes, and in fact may actually result in steps backwards. But that seeing results is not our point. We are here to love and to live fully in joy and humility, with each other, to live fully and abundantly in such a way that we allow others to live abundantly - others from the past, present and future, in wholeness. And then to believe that somehow, somewhere, in ways we do not yet see or know, a new world of justice, peace, and health will settle upon this earth.
I’ll run home and post that quote and then a few more thoughts at that time.
Good post. LOVE.
OK this is not exactly the one I was thinking of but it’s as good if not better than that one I was meaning to share….
this is from Rebecca Solnit’s Looking into Darkness in her book Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities…
“Hope is not like a lottery ticket that you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I say this because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency, because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and the marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope…To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable…anything could happen, and whether we act or not has everything to do with it. The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as of the grave.”
And yet. I would still pair this urging of hope with the quote I was thinking of before about hopelessness. Life calls us to both - to faith meaning hope and faith meaning simply, living. I’ll find that other quote and post it when I can.
later - g
One more thought. In theologian and ethicist Sharon Welch’s words, we must live from “an ethic of risk” rather than “an ethic of control.” We must surrender to the beauty and terror of recognizing our utter helplessness. I’ve known this feeling fully and in my body only twice in my life - in the horrible crazy process of the foster portion of the fost-adopt process. I knew it first with Gracie when I realized that I loved her already, and I might lose her, and soon. And that nothing I could do could change either of those. That I was her mother already, despite any resistance I might attempt. And that she could be taken from me, to be someone else’s daughter. And again, we faced this feeling down with Josef. It’s the truth of life, of love. What it means to be human, really. That is, that we choose to love in spite of the fact that we are out of control of the outcome.
It’s very Zen Buddhist now that I think of it..Very zen and the art of archery - where we aim but do not aim. We seek but do not seek. We look but do not look. We have only by letting go.
Alright, I better stop commenting on your blog and head off to my own.
later,
g
Nicely put.
[...] parts of life. Sometimes, the hard parts are deeply empowering, as I discussed in my post “Birth as an Opportunity for Life Not Just Survival.” But other times, the hard parts erode our sense of ourselves, disempower us, diminish. [...]