Milli Hill - Give Birth Like a Feminist

HQ

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ,

an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 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

Cover

Title Page GIVE BIRTH LIKE A FEMINIST Your Body. Your Baby. Your Choices. Milli Hill

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

Loose Women

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 many women have it. This focus-shifting is epitomised so well by the hashtag #notallmen– used to remind women just how many good, well-rounded men there are in the world when they try to highlight any issue from mansplaining to rape. ‘#notallmen are rapists. #notallmenhave sexist attitudes. #notallmenbeat their wives, remember!’ Hang on, the women say, we don’t want to talk about the large percentage of wonderful men who respect women – we want to talk about the other bunch, who don’t. But in the diversion, the point has already been diluted, making the aggressor seem like the victim in the process. This diversionary tactic happens in conversations about birth, too. Attempts to complain about anything from lack of consent, to women not being properly listened to in labour, to institutionalised misogyny and racism in maternity care, are so often met with protests from health workers of ‘It’s not like that where I work!’ or ‘Not all midwives/obstetricians are like that, it’s important not to make sweeping statements’, etc. So, before we get started on our journey through this book, I want to stress that my focus throughout is not on individuals, but on the systems in which they operate. Maternity care is a system that needs to be challenged, built by and within another system that needs to be challenged – patriarchy. Please don’t divert attention from this vital issue if you feel that you personally are working in a way that fully respects women as autonomous, or if you received gold-standard care in your own pregnancy. This is indeed wonderful, but it’s not really what we are all here to talk about.