HW 34 - Some Initial Thoughts On Birth

     The ideas and ideologies that surround birth are both relevant and completely foreign to me. While I am aware of where and when I was born, I will never be able to understand the mental and physical emotions my mother recalls as her most painful and excruciating moment.  Having noticed I used the word "never", my diction seems to reveal my unconscious fear of becoming a mother, or rather all that comes with becoming responsible for a child that is born from my own womb.  The path toward parenthood is unwelcoming as I picture a white-walled hospital room with a nervous father pacing about, a distressed mother grimacing as she is in labor, and anxious relatives waiting impatiently.  I'd wonder what decisions would have to be made after the umbilical cord is severed?  Who will disagree with the choices I decide to make?  Am I fit to raise a child?  I fear that a hardship my child will encounter, even at birth, will be of my doing.  Knowing that I could have prevented such misfortune would pose as the grief I may possibly cause to my child and myself.*  The idea that childbearing is reason enough to say that being a woman is more difficult than being a man is seeming less insane as I continue to collect my thoughts, memories, and associations about birth.

       Sitting down uncomfortably on the uptown 6 train, I glance over at people with headphones over their ears, reading books, staring off into space, dosing off into sleep and find myself trying to tune in on other people's conversations simply because it would be best that I not be left alone to my wandering thoughts.  The sound of two women talking boisterously about the hardships of being women, oppressed by men, did not fail to reach the canals of my ears.  "Being a woman is far more difficult than being a man.  It's us women who have to go through the pain and suffering of birth.  It is childbearing that leaves us with stretch marks beyond repair.  Men receive all the glory, and for what?  What pain have they endured?"  I thought to myself, "What ignorance would drive a woman to compare her pain from childbearing to that of a man, incapable of giving birth?"  Many women believe that there is a sense of heroism that directly correlates to their ability to give birth.  Suppose stretch marks are like battle wounds, merely existing but, never boasted about.  If many women are so concerned about receiving adulation and justice for their efforts as mothers, why do they show such shame in their "battle wounds" by seeking out all means to remove them?  It seems that I have come to a natural stopping point, however, we can really begin to focus on how our society or rather, its women, stigmatize birth and create practices to counter whatever obstacles childbearing may bring about.

*"the greatest griefs are those that we cause ourselves"- Sophocles - was an Ancient Greek dramatist, playwright, priest, and a politician of Athens. (496 BC- 406 BC).

Questions I would like to explore in this unit: 

- Why is natural birth seen as respectable?

- Why does society put a huge amount of significance on birth, so much to the extent that it creates books guiding future parents on "the right way" to raise a child?

- What is a "healthier" birth? (Hospital, at home, under-water?)

- What do stretch marks represent in the eyes of women who have already given birth and are impregnated?

- If a woman does not desire to reproduce at any point in her life, is her life considered "incomplete" because she does not muse for a child?

- What do some women regret about taking pain-numbing drugs while in labor?

- Why does society focus more on the role women play in birth than the role men play?

- Why do certain cultures eat the placenta after the birthing of a baby?

- How do we decide what is right or wrong for a child?

- How often do parents consider other parent's experiences with birth while making certain decisions?

- Is our society mocking birth with the advent of shows like 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom?