Failure of Perfection - Caused by Natural Birth or by the Disruption of Natural Birth?

Natural birth is just yet another impossible ideal we hold women up to: perfect body, perfect looks, perfect job, perfect mother, perfect home, perfect organic cook.

--poster on another blog

No, these are symptoms of the denial of a woman’s most basic physiological ability – to conceive, gestate, birth, and sustain an infant with her breast. The perfection syndrome and the list of symptoms here are the result of the socialization of this culture – and a focus on things of external value. Looks, careers, etc.

Truly, “natural birth” is not an impossible ideal. Women have done natural birth for eons. Now we have the technology to assist those small few who cannot and to eliminate the causes of most of the deaths during childbirth. In the US high mortality rates are more associated with the misuse of technology and the toxic, stressful environment, and older women giving birth. The US, like other industrialized nations, made significant gains decreasing mortality rates through the sixties with addressing infection, sanitation, and nutrition. These are causes still plaguing most of the third world on this planet in 2007. Save the Children 2006 Mother’s Day edition states that "Sixty million women give birth at home, without the help of professional birth attendant with delivery skills" and " More than 500,000 women died from complications of pregnancy an childbirth" and 4 million babies die every year within their first birthday. Thirty-six percent of the 4 million neonatal deaths are from infectious diseases and another 27% are a result of prematurity (malnourishment and other poor living conditions).

The "ideal" of the perfect woman is an American illness, not seen in third world countries. They have neither resources nor the time to worry about their breast size to fulfil a perfect image, nor do they worry about their thigh dimpling, their hair, nail color and clothes all matching, and brand-name label clothing to fit in their suburban neighborhoods where they park their SUV mini-vans with the latest DVD equipment upgrades to keep their alive child pacified while they chatter on the cell phone en route to shopping, dance classes, and other "necessities" of American life.

Natural birth is not the reason American women feel like failures in birth and have perfectionism complexes. Rather, it is from a belief in man-made perfection and a lack of sacredness and respect for anything natural (unless it can be bought) that has distorted women's view of what a woman is about and what makes her good and REAL and WHOLE. The "ideal of perfection" is just a SYMPTOM of the disregard for women and the belief that women's bodies are defective and in need of rescue from natural birth. Instead of seeing a woman's body as perfect -- as it truly already is, and how it functions to conceive and bring forth life, a medicalized model of birth that is controlling, expensive financially and in cost to lives, and devaluing model of birth rules this society that has 5% of the world population with 70% of the world's wealth. Disruption of her perfection is what causes women to feel like they have failed. Women are being failed and expected to be some outside standard of perfection. When they buy into it they feel like failures.

Failure is a sensate feeling of the body when physiology and basic needs are disrupted. 500,000 women around the world are failed by a society that takes and has so much and squanders it so. Poor nutrition contributes to cycles of poor health and poverty while the US has a fast food restaurant on every corner, and Americans are the fattest people in the world despite the best resources for health, the best healthcare in the world, and a consumer base and income for a weight loss and fitness industry that in itself would feed a third world country and train midwives. The devaluing of women's body and the ideal of perfection (sexually, physically) is promoted in every commercial on television to the number one video industry of pornography. Even the most educated, wealthy, and nourished America woman has a high likelihood of maternal and infant mortality because many of her basic needs are disrupted in modern birth -- privacy, respect for her soul and body, food and water, movement, drugged ... and, she is also failed in a culture where how her body looks, not who she is, is the measurement. She is expected to birth with high tech and how painfree and technolized her birth was is her status and measurement. It is her "right" to have a technological birth even when it disrupts her body's ability to birth as it was perfectly designed. Social acceptance of this is the source of feelings of failure.

While America squanders resources on non-medically necessary obstetric intervention on perfectly healthy and perfectly capable women who have every possible resource available to them, the resources could be better used to saving birthing women and babies in the third world countries. Ain't gonna happen --- American doctors trained to save lives don't even want to live in rural areas of the US where a number of women do desperately need life saving skills. Better to stay in the cities and practice on healthy, perfectly capable of women -- where the money is. According to Save the Children, the price tag to help Africa is $1 billion per year to save up to 740,000 newborn lives. Instead, we invaded Iraq at a cost today of $405,878,677,142. http://costofwar.com/index.html. Click and watch with your eyes spin and wonder how it could have been better used. Today spending is about $6000 per second and $100,000 per five hours. Shame on America.

I shudder to think though if Bush had not declined to support the CHILD and Newborn Act (HR 4222) last year and had actually approved money to support saving women and babies' lives in third world countries (something in me snorts with disgust at how little concern would be given these women and babies as not even American women and babies are regardled as worthy). Today, if America took on this challenge, there would be a surgical suite in every village now. And, even the Gates Foundation, on it's home page, says hospitals are NOT the answer. This means access to induction, epidural, and surgical birth is NOT the answer. -- in Africa, America, or anywhere. The bill asked for "authorization of increased resources to save the lives of mother and babies and require a comprehensive US strategy for improving newborn, child and maternal health." The US is asked to save these babies whose dilemma is poverty, disease, and nutrition and is good basic health care and midwifery care that is known to decrease the maternal and infant mortality rates (below that of the US) in other industrialized nations. The US is not saving it's own women and children from barbaric, non-evidence-based care and violating treatment. "The ideal of perfection is caused by natural birth advocates." Give me a break.

The sense of "failure" that many American women feel after giving birth is rarely about "not being natural enough.” The failure is a deep, non-verbal expression that results from a devaluing of women in general, even by women, and by the ongoing disruption in Her physiological hormonal process. A proponent of “natural birth” states, Many women, with lesser interventions, still hold themselves up to the ‘natural’ ideal and feel as if they've failed when they couldn't ‘resist’ the interventions. Apparently, according to this poster and the blogger, the feelings of failure women have in not being able to resist interventions are blamed upon women who did have natural birth and “brag” and “gloat” about it. They are chastised to not speak of it to other women as this is rude, and hurts the feelings of women who “fail” to give birth naturally. The answer, they believe, is for women who birth naturally to stop talking about it. C’mon. What distortions. Feminine betrayal by women. Evidence-based research tells us that natural (non-mediated) birth with mother in upright positions, moving freely, nourished, hydrated, and with loved ones, not strangers, and it is clear that techniques for managing pain naturally are healthier for the woman and her baby. Six million women give birth without any skilled caregivers and in this country a woman who chooses to birth "unassisted" is hardly unassisted by world standards. She is nourished, has shelter, and access to the greatest health care in the world, and has access to information to totally educate herself but she is treated like a heretic.

This claiming of natural birth as leading women to feel like failures is such cultural psycho-babble, double-talk perpetuated by those who for whatever reason have dismissed birth as a natural occurring, physiological, biological, intimate process and are deeply engaged in victimization and displacement of self-responsibility.

“The exception I take with the natural birth ideal is that it raises the bar so incredibly high. Not only are we supposed to try to know almost as much as our midwives or doctors about birth so that we can be ready to question them (well, just the doctors) at every turn (all while having a baby!), but we are to try to make the birth experience as natural and softly lighted and hands-off and beautiful as possible---ideally without the most effective pain relief for most women, the epidural. It is no more realistic or desirable for most women to forgo these comfort or safety measures, however much their "pure" necessity is debated, than to expect women to be perfect homemakers or perfect career women/moms.”

And, why not? For eons women have given birth in all sorts of substandard situations and environments. At the turn of the century, British and American women who lived in poverty and gave birth at home attended by other women and even on the streets had better maternal and infant mortality rates than the rich, white women who gave birth in hospitals. These were also the socialite women expected to have perfect homes, children, and lives, but who did not have to do the work themselves.

“Supposed to try to know almost as much as our midwives or doctors about birth…” Hmmm. It occurs to me, why not? I wonder one hundred years ago and back through time if every woman did know about birthing. And, did she know how to handle many of the problems that could arise. Recently, on my sister’s fortieth birthday, my mother was sharing her perspective of the experience again. She shared that she had hemorrhaged and said, “Wonder how many women giving birth at home and hospitals before they knew what to do.” They would be medical people. My mother’s generation – women born in thirties through sixties -- were particularly indoctrinated by the medical machine as they came of age during the period of declining mortality rates that is solely credited to medicine and men. Prior to one hundred+ years ago giving birth was primarily in the women’s domain. Women supported and educated their young women. Birth was not a taboo thing to be done only in bright, metal filled rooms cloaked in drapes and conducted by gloved and masked men. Women knew how to care for their own body (life literally depended upon it) and for each other.

I quote from another blog, http://kemicutie.blogspot.com/2007/02/so-what-occupies-my-thoughts-now-well.html :

What about the pain?", is another question that is asked. Well, I have no personal experience with this, but the way I see it is this way: My mother had all 6 of her babies naturally and her mother before that and before that until the first mother. My father's mother who is a strong Nigerian woman had her babies naturally and her mother, and her mother until the first woman. My body is not broken. If all my foremothers can birth babies naturally and with no complications then I can do the same. I'm not afraid of the pain. We as women need to take back that power that has been stripped away from us and know that we are strong and we can do this. Yes, it's difficult but the pain is there for a reason. I'm personally more afraid of the cascade of interventions than any labor pain.

A quote from another blog from a poster who opposes the natural birth movement:

The exception I take with the natural birth ideal is that it raises the bar so incredibly high. Not only are we supposed to try to know almost as much as our midwives or doctors about birth so that we can be ready to question them (well, just the doctors) at every turn (all while having a baby!), but we are to try to make the birth experience as natural and softly lighted and hands-off and beautiful as possible---ideally without the most effective pain relief for most women, the epidural. It is no more realistic or desirable for most women to forego these comfort or safety measures, however much their "pure" necessity is debated, than to expect women to be perfect homemakers or perfect career women/moms.

Society has evolved in the last sixty years to mirror the belief of women that they can “have it all” -- homes, families, and career. And, it is still not true. I have come to believe and share with younger women: “You can have it all, just not all at the same time.” Trying to have it all – as we were lead to believe in the eighties we could do -- does not come without a huge price. Delegating our child to the care of others under the psychobabble (researched) promotion that if “mother is happy, children are happy” lead us astray. The pendulum of natural birth of the sixties was swinging back. Childbirth and childcare are two important areas where women were lead astray as they delegated their work to others. Women now have childcare providers, house cleaners, and assistants to do their work. More women than ever schedule their child’s birth, go to the hospital, and even the most powerful of feminists who demand equal pay, maternity leave, and improved childcare will crawl up on the table, have a catheter stuck in their spine to avoid pain, and in doing so, allow their baby’s birth from their body to be done to them. Women don’t have time or tolerance for any more pain that what modern life gives. Painful marriages and painful relationships with children are the effect of our socially acceptable delegation of our womanhood to others.

This is the American ideal of the perfect woman and her relationships and life. It's not the world's and it's not even close for the women in third world countries.

Natural birth LOWERS the bar --- it requires a woman to just be a woman. A perfectly designed woman.


In the US it is the natural birth advocates, the MIDWIVES, the grassroots (those without the big pocketbooks as they say) who are trying to make a difference. Check out the Oregon midwives who are traveling to Sierra Leone to bring supplies, education, and training to women there. Training skilled caregivers to be with birthing and laboring women is a huge part of the process. I hope you'll support these courageous, compassionate women. http://www.globalmidwives.org/news_job_openings.php They are in need of financial support and supplies. Gives new meaning to that bumper sticker we've all seen: "It'll be a great day when the Air Force has to have a bake sale to buy a new bomber."

A Must see movie is The Girl in the Cafe. http://www.hbo.com/films/girlinthecafe/