interviews under the shade structure

We live in a society where birthing is treated as a medical process where the doctors are in control. In fact, women are encouraged to turn over all responsibility for birthing to their doctors as though birthing were in illness. This is one of the reasons why so many women end up having cesarean births. Doctors are often impatient and rather than allowing the birthing process to run its course naturally, they cut a woman open. This approach also encourages fear in women, which is why so many want pain killers to numb themselves from the pain they experience during child birth. It is ironic that we've come to see birth in this way when for most of human existence, birth was not handled in this way. Birth was a natural part of life and women had their babies with the support of other women in the most natural ways possible.

The two people I decided to interviewed understand that birth is a natural process and this is how they've come to approach it.

"I'll start by introducing myself. My name is Ryan, I'm 29 years old and I'm a mother of three children." I met Ryan in the beginning of the summer through her work at Our School at Blair Grocery in New Orleans. Ryan and I decided to speak underneath the shade structure when we began our interview. I started by asking her if she could share the stories of the births of her three children. It seemed as though she was comfortable sharing and as though she had told these stories many times before. "I was married for almost two years before Leah was born. We were in the hospital and I had an epidural." (an epidural is a local pain killer that is frequently administered to women during labor). Ryan explained that during her first birth she "freaked out mentally" because she didn't feel like she was in control of the birth. Continuing with her story, she squinted, "Jonah was born 19 months later." She told me that Jonah's birth was induced with petocine and that he came very quickly. Her third child, Miles, was an all natural birth that she also had in the hospital with the help of a dullah and a midwife. She told me that through each birth, she was able to learn more about herself. Before Miles was born, her husband, Kyle, showed her "The Business of Being Born" which helped her make a decision about how to have her third child. After she watched the film she became a little wiser and less afraid.

She said that birth of her three children was the most influential and positive things that had occurred in her life. Her husband and family were present during each birth with the exception of her last child Miles. She and her husband decided that they wanted to have him on their own in a more private setting. Ryan told me that with her first child Leah, she felt anticipation and fear of the unknown. With Jonah her second, she felt excitement and slightly less anxious because she had been through it before. With Miles she felt relaxed even though she experienced more pain. It probably helped that she had the support of a dulla and a midwife who was nurturing. As she reflected on her three births, she realized that some of the fears that arose during child birth came from just being in the hospital. "Birth is something very natural and they put fear in the women instead of educating them and helping them to feel less anxious... People don't realize that they have options." The hospital didn't allow her to eat during first two births which made her feel weak and a lack of energy. Ryan also told me that giving birth to children was expensive. Each birth was costly, but the first birth was the most expensive - Leah: $13,000, Jonah: $10,000, Miles- $5,000. Aside from taking control of the birthing process, doctors create the image that they know what their doing and that the women don't. Toward the end of our conversation, Ryan told me that she felt good about her decision to have her last baby naturally.


Bill raised his "camel unfiltered cigarette" to his mouth and released the smoke through his nostrils. "I was at the Woodstock festival in 1969 living in-" and that was about as far as he could get before the rest of the participants listening could cut him off. "WOODSTOCK?!?" everyone mouthed. He laughed his toothless grin and continued his story, "I was living in New York at the time and we were driving up to the festival. Two girls on our trip were pregnant at the time but I didn't know they were pregnant enough to have babies." Bill Hill was 19 years old when he first midwifed two babies in one night. He had delivered cows and dogs before so he felt he had a bit of experience and "knew the way it worked". "The situation was really scary." Another drag from the cigarette. " Because we were out in the country and their ain't no sanitary stuff out there. Ya know? I didn't know how to cut the umbilical cords for the two women." He mentioned that since there had been a lot of marijuana smoking at the concert, there were tons of roach clips laying around which he used to clip the cords. "It don't take no rocket scientist to have a baby."

"I delivered my girls in my home, on the kitchen table, by myself." With raised eyebrows, the participants questioned his 'loneliness' in the birth, considering his wife pushed the baby out. "Well, she couldn't do much. She pushed it out, but I did most of the work" He said pointing his finger into his chest. " I had the harder job." We let him continue, despite our differences in opinions. Bill believed that the process after the birth is more difficult than the actual birth. "You have to take care of the placenta, you have to make sure the baby's clean, make sure there's no bleeding." Bill and his wife dealt with a lot of issues before and after the birth and when the second daughter was 3 weeks old, "my wife didn't want to be a mom anymore, and decided to leave. I didn't know what to do but I knew that my neighbor had recently had a child and was breastfeeding. I rang on her doorbell and asked her to breast feed my child because I didn't want to put her on formula," and his neighbor agreed.

All in all, Bill claimed to have supported seven women throughout their births which struck me as remarkable. "Birth is the most invigorating thing I've seen. Seeing the baby come out, cleaning it, its amazing. You know it?" I shook my head no. "Life is just a buncha cycles, and its just amazing that your getting to learn about it in school."

The last person I interviewed was my friend Sam. I couldn't find anyone else I might be able to interview, so I told Sam to create a fictional story in one minute and here's what he came up with: " I was in South Africa with my uncle Jimmy. We were on this crazy natural reserve with all these mosquitoes and animals. Out of nowhere we saw a giraffe running for its life! And a lion was chasing it! The giraffe was sprinting and then a baby giraffe fell out and started running from the lion as well!" Here, I interrupted: "Was there any blood?" I asked. "No blood, just a bunch of this nasty goo. The baby was covered in slime and started running. It slipped a couple of times because of the slime, but luckily, the lion got tired of running and stopped the chase." When I asked Sam what he learned from this experience, he responded by saying "I've just got a new found respect for giraffes."

As you can see from this story, many young men have no clue what a birth is really like- but someone like Sam is not alone. Even women like Ryan was afraid before she had her first child because the birthing process has been so medicalized and removed from its natural state.

I would like to learn more about the role and the history of midwives. Particularly, I'm interested in learning about how it came to be that midwives who once delivered most of the babies in the United States have now become so marginal and some states even outlawed.