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GIVE BIRTH LIKE A FEMINIST
Your Body. Your Baby. Your Choices.
Milli Hill
HQ
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ,
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Copyright © Milli Hill 2019
Milli Hill asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN: 9780008313104
Ebook Edition © 2019 ISBN: 9780008313111
Version: 2019-07-26
Contents
Copyright
Introduction
Chapter 1
‘Am I Allowed?’: The Birth Room Power Imbalance
Chapter 2
Birth: the Land that Feminism Forgot?
Chapter 3
When Women’s Bodies Became Men’s Business: A History of Birth
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Women’s Bodies: Unfit for Purpose?
Chapter 6
Birth and Culture: ‘Fish can’t see water’
Chapter 7
Birth Rights are Women’s Rights are Human Rights
Stand and Deliver
Resources
Footnotes
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Publisher
Birth is a feminist issue. And it’s the feminist issue nobody’s talking about. This book aims to start that conversation.
As I’ve gone through the process of writing this book, I’ve had a few moments where I’ve wondered, why me? My inner critic (don’t try to tell me you haven’t got one of those) has said to me, ‘Milli? Do you really want to open this particular can of worms? As if talking about childbirth wasn’t treacherous enough, now you want to drop the F-bomb?! Are you nuts? That is literally the worst combination of topics. You are going to get burned at the stake – well, metaphorically speaking, at least.’ My inner critic is such a gas.
It’s true, it’s not always easy to talk about childbirth, and it’s not always easy to raise feminist issues. People can even argue about what feminism actually is, but to me it’s simple: feminism just means noticing when women are getting a raw deal, and taking action. And this is where the problem lies with childbirth. Not enough people are noticing that women are getting a raw deal, and not enough people are taking action. We’ve become blinkered to the massive imbalance of power in the birth room, and somehow come to accept that birth is inherently unpleasant and undignified, or even traumatic, degrading and violating. ‘That’s just how it is!’ Well I want this book to tell you it doesn’t have to be that way, and as feminists we must no longer tolerate this state of affairs.
Feminism doesn’t have to be complicated, and it doesn’t have to be exclusive. Giving birth like a feminist doesn’t mean giving birth a certain way, just as doing anything else – career, relationships, parenting – ‘like a feminist’ doesn’t require a one-size-fits-all approach. You can give birth like a feminist in any setting and in any way, from elective caesarean in a private hospital to freebirth in the ocean. All that’s required is that you have somehow moved from a passive place where you view birth as something that happens to you and over which you have no control, to a place of understanding that you may get a raw deal in this experience if you don’t wake up and get yourself into the driving seat. Essentially: take charge, take control, and make conscious choices.
When I speak at mainstream maternity events, I am often shocked by the fact that telling women and their partners that they have rights and choices in the birth room so often seems to come as a revelation. Many people have no sense of themselves as autonomous or powerful in their labour and birth, nor do they feel that there is anything they can do or not do to influence the way their birth unfolds. They are often misinformed and, to compound this, their belief that they have little or no agency then prevents them from seeking out much information. What is the point in learning about your options against a backdrop in which the phrase ‘not allowed’ is used with such alarming frequency? Most pregnant couples believe that the majority of choices are out of their hands. In practical terms this means that, on a daily basis, fingers enter the vaginas of women who do not know they can decline. How can this be acceptable? Even the most progressive of maternity conversations emphasises ‘informed consent’, with the unspoken assumption that consent, not ‘decision making’, or possibly even ‘informed refusal’, is the goal. Maternity professionals will speak of how they ‘consent’ women – using it as a verb, ‘I am just going to go and consent her’, as if the professional is the active one in the exchange and the women herself is passive. It’s time to challenge a system that perpetuates this myth of unquestioning co-operation and female powerlessness.
When you raise a complaint about a female experience, you quite often get quickly reminded of how unusual, niche or rare the problem is, and just how good so