Is giving birth like a feminist even possible?
By: Abbey Heffer
Tags: Womens Health, Family, Pregnancy, Giving Birth, Self

Is giving birth like a feminist even possible?

Figuring out how to reclaim control in the birthing room.

Photo by Carlo Navarro on Unsplash

After getting pregnant (unplanned but not unwanted), I bought a grand total of one birthing book. My family thought I was joking when I cracked open How To Give Birth Like A Feminist.

Despite Milli Hill’s advice, however, I was fairly set on going into the whole ordeal of birth-giving little better than blind. My midwife agreed. It’s better not to have too many expectations, especially for your first child.

A passive participant in my own birthing room

I’d always seen birth as something that happens to you, rather than something you have an active role to play in.

It’s something you try not to think about when you are born with the necessary reproductive organs to fall pregnant. Then, once you consciously decide to keep your bun in its proverbial oven, it becomes that daunting inevitability that you need to just grit your teeth and get through.

I’d already been throwing up five hours a day for almost six months by the time How To Give Birth Like A Feminist landed in my lap; I had no illusions about being one of the lucky few to experience birth-giving positively.

By then, optimism just wasn’t an option.

The British education system prepared me poorly for pregnancy. I’d expected it to be easy; how else did so many teenage girls not realise they were pregnant until their baby came out in the toilet? Hollywood agreed, giving birth is a universally horrendous process. Pregnancy, however, is supposed to pass in a glowed-up breeze of hormones and contented belly-rubbing.

When my own pregnancy pummelled me into a dark pit of sickness, depression and immobility, I figured it was only going to get worse from there.

As it turns out, education and Hollywood got things backwards for me.

A rare moment of peace in the few hours I didn’t spend throwing up while pregnant.

My birthing experience was obviously not without its downsides. I still screamed for an epidural, swore at the huge Russian doctor as she ripped my placenta out by the roots after it failed to detach naturally (Spoiler: the afterbirth doesn’t always just slide out as an off-camera after-thought). I lost more than a litre of blood, howled like a mad cow and was beyond caring when the last dregs of my battered bowls emptied onto the delivery table.

I didn’t fall in love with my daughter at first sight. After an hour of watching her crawl her way around my chest, I couldn’t feel much other than shock that I’d produced this bizarre little creature.

But by far my biggest personal takeaway — aside from the pain and the existence of this beautiful, blue-eyed fur-ball — was that it takes a supreme amount of trust in yourself to give birth. More than that, it takes an otherworldly amount of self-love.

I gave birth in a country with people-centred socialised healthcare

In Germany, you have a “Krankenkasse”, or health account, which covers all your medical needs. Anything that is not covered can be insured privately or through your employer — like some non-routine dental procedures. It is paid for out of your monthly salary or income, like tax, with the other half being paid by your employer.

The fertility rate is also very low in Germany, which makes for a very strong system of maternity and childcare policies. Both birth-givers and co-parents are hugely supported from conception through to their child turning 25.

Germany is also fairly conservative culturally, meaning many maternity wards are operated entirely by midwives favouring as little medical intervention as possible. Others are more clinical, with specialised intensive care units attached to the “midwife circle” where birthing takes place.

People-centred healthcare meant I had the choice of which hospital I could give birth in, rather than my insurance or circumstances choosing for me.

I opted for a “baby friendly” hospital. That doesn’t mean other German hospitals are baby unfriendly, of course. It just meant this hospital specialised in early-hours bonding and breast feeding.

Sometimes our choices are removed by social circumstance and medical necessity.

You need to have choices before you can make them

Hill’s major premise in How to Give Birth Like a Feminist is that birth-givers need to know their options before entering the birthing room. However, for many, especially in the UK and Ireland where the majority of her book is based, this ability to choose is taken away by social circumstances and medical necessity.

In the United States, you must seek medical care in a hospital associated with your insurance company. In the UK, your ability to seek care in a certain maternity ward is often decided by your postcode rather than your birthing preferences. In Germany, this decision is taken out of your hands by when you go into labour, as premature babies must be born in a hospital with an intensive care unit. In all cases, your choice of hospital is influenced by capacity—if there aren’t enough beds or midwives, people are turned away during labour.

Different hospitals can have very different birthing practices and preferences, which they impose upon those who give birth there. For example, I would have found it very difficult to not attempt breastfeeding in the hospital I chose to give birth in. I decided against another hospital renowned for encouraging bottle-feeding when breastfeeding doesn’t work out fast enough.

My ability to decide on a hospital, however, was a privilege not all are able to capitalise on. In some countries, this privilege of choice is even delineated according to race.

Actively giving birth rather than passively accepting it

I was able to reclaim agency in the birthing room by making decisions as they became necessary, rather than planning them in advance.

Given the choice, I’d rather not have had a former KGB operative screaming at me to cough, not breathe in her heavily-accented German while ripping a huge chunk of flesh from my body — but the alternative was far worse, trust me. It would have involved arms up vaginas. I’ll not say more.

Photo by Aditya Romansa on Unsplash

If I had drawn my red-lines before entering the birthing room, as Mill suggests, I’d have set myself up to relinquish my agency to medical necessity. I’d have been setting myself up to fail.

However, by actively engaging in the process as it happened — deciding when to take a bath, which oils to use, when to walk, when to sit, when to howl — I felt in control at all times.

The same applied for painkillers. I decided in advance that I was open to all available pain relief — from glorified paracetamol to the full epidural. My partner and I are genuinely considering naming our second child Meptid after the opioid that granted me four whole hours of bearable contractions leading up to the final phase of the birth.

In the end, I was too close to delivering by the time I realised our beloved Meptid had worn off and I really wanted an epidural.

If I’d have had the epidural, however, I wouldn’t have lived to tell the tale of how unbelievably satisfying the final stage of birthing is. When your entire body is working to push, push the child out, each wave of pushing feels like release. Admittedly, experiencing contractions when not actively pushing was horrendous — but listening to your body’s desire to push, and acting on it, is a beautiful feeling.

Photo by Jimmy Conover on Unsplash

Listening to your body for the first time

Those socialised as female are taught from the absolute get-go to control their bodily urges, to ignore and suppress the things their body tells them to do.

It begins early, with non-sexual masturbation in early childhood, and extends to learning to ignore period pains, to just get on with it. Later in life, we are told to police ourselves and our actions, not to submit to our baser instincts. We must not lust, must not be loose, must not be overtly sexual or too frigid.

Even during pregnancy, we are expected to keep calm and carry on, push through our morning sickness and make it to work on time.

Regardless of societal expectations, however, the fact of being pregnant forces us to listen. Cravings force us to eat certain foods. I wanted nothing but parsley for weeks; I ate the entire party’s worth of tabbouleh at my wedding, literally taking the dish upstairs and scoffing it in secret. Breathlessness forces us to sit down, low blood pressure too.

Pain is easy enough to push through, but it’s hard to resist the thudding darkness that precedes passing out.

Complications during my pregnancy meant that I was forced to listen to my body for the first time since I was the infant eating, sleeping, shitting and repeating. Pregnancy forced me to make demands of my partner that I’d not needed to before, he needed to relearn how to read my body and how to support it. And so did I.

Pregnancy can be very photogenic, but the lived reality is often far darker.

Like in pregnancy, listening to your body means power in the birthing room. It provides an anchor to which you can tether your judgements and decision-making. During the second phase of labour, I had the urge to flex my pelvic-floor muscles. Not push, exactly, but flex. In doing so, I was able to push my cervix from 4cm dilated to 7cm — much to the midwife’s amazement.

In turn, this meant she was able to finally break my waters, which exploded like a released balloon all over her and the birthing bed. The entire affair was so ridiculous that I lapsed into a hysterical laughing fit, which had the dual advantage of flooding my body with endorphins and putting more downward pressure on my womb.

Is it possible to give birth like a feminist?

The short answer is probably no.

There are too many structural restrictions in place that prevent women from choosing the circumstances of their birth-giving experience. Class and race continue to play too large a role in delineating who is permitted to give birth like a feminist, and who will be lucky to survive giving birth at all. And, no, the race-based element is not exclusive to the United States.

Poverty and residential address should not define where someone is able to give birth, and yet, too often, it does.

What’s worse is that these structural disadvantages extend into post-natal care and can seriously effect early development and infant mortality rates, particularly poverty.

There is no calm after the storm

It took a fair few days of getting to know each other, but I fell in love with my daughter today.

She’d been crying and miming suckling, but every time I put her to my breast, she gave up trying to feed, clamped her mouth shut and fell asleep. After a third time trying to feed her, I gave in and called the midwife. She laughed and said, “Sie will nur zu Mama.”

She just wants to get to her mama.

I melted.

As a family, we have weathered the first part of this journey together and, though I don’t think it’s possible to give birth like a feminist, it is possible to make your own choices while giving birth and retain a sense of control.

It is important that feminists realise and appreciate the structural differences in birthing experiences that endanger vulnerable groups throughout the reproductive process. Until these are overcome, there is no such thing as feminism in the birthing room.

I guess the next step will be to see whether it’s possible to breast-feed like a feminist…