I gave up watching One Born Every Minute when I was pregnant because I feared that, like alcohol or soft cheese, it might be bad for me. But flicking through the channels last week, I stopped to watch a woman in Birmingham, high on painkillers, prepare to push. I mean, I’m cracking up again now thinking about it – about the sweet tattooed boyfriend who leaned against the bed as she sucked on the gas, before sliding to the ground with a hefty wallop. And as she continued to push, the midwife barely breaking eye contact (later she would snort with laughter back at the nurses station), he eventually gained consciousness and coolly called her “knobhead”.
I mention this, this detail from a stranger’s labour, because a new book and exhibition, My Birth, by the artist Carmen Winant, discusses the need for such stories. Very few people, she writes, ask her about what it’s like to give birth. “The delivery of another human being: weren’t they curious about its effect?” she asks. But sometimes she wants to say: “Just ask me,” providing a long list of questions that she would be willing to answer, including: “Can you describe the quality of pain? Did you fear for your life? Did you have the sense that you were giving birth to yourself? Did you experience orgasm?” I would add, from my desk littered with crayons: “Did you try to make the doctor like you? How did you sleep that night? What did the room smell like? How do you feel when you think about it today?” In New York, Winant is exhibiting thousands of found photographs of women giving birth (including one of her mother) and, looking at the pictures online, after the shock of seeing something that has remained private for so long, the effect is slightly dizzying.
On the one hand you quickly feel as though photos aren’t enough – that there is no satisfactory way for one to record a person entering the world. And on the other, the giant jigsaw of similar pictures means the whole process becomes quite… ordinary. Which, of course, shouldn’t be a surprise. If we were designed differently, every person would be able to remember a similar moment before we were placed on our mother’s breast, and if culture were designed differently, many of us would be encouraged to remember a similar moment before our babies were placed on ours.
Over the past couple of years, in tandem with One Born Every Minute’s success – they concentrate on the relationships in the room, the baby simply a parsley garnish – there have been a number of campaigns against Facebook and Instagram, objecting to their censorship of images of childbirth. Which inevitably makes you wonder about the effect of this, this absence of images depicting the dilated bloody reality of birth, rather than the One Born Every Minute-style sanitised and pixellated edit. Many of us approach it with a certain horror, having never seen or heard the many truths of what we’re heading for, and one grim effect of that is that we have no idea of our place in the room, other than birthing object that something happens to. Surely there are a thousand #MeToo moments happening in delivery rooms across the country, in part due to pregnant women’s ignorance and fear. We don’t know what’s right, which means that, also, we don’t know what’s wrong.
But pictures are only a part of the solution. It’s not simply the fact of a birth that needs to be considered, it’s the effect of it. Quite soon after I’d given birth, I realised that, because my baby was healthy, and I’d eventually made it home, it was no longer considered appropriate to talk about the experience. Which was annoying, because it was the biggest, most profound, painful, traumatic, bizarre thing I’d experienced in my life, and I was keen to pick over it, explore it a little more. I felt a pressure to move on, and count my 6lb of blessings, rather than focus any more on what happened in hospital.
And later, when I’d talk to other women about their own experiences, I’d notice a familiar fearful energy in their eyes: there’s a cautiousness in what we’re encouraged to share. Which adds to what feels like a forced misty unknowableness around birth, shadows of the “twilight sleep” women endured when giving birth in the 1900s. Our twilight comes postnatally. The stories that do make it out of the vault are inevitably horror stories, too – stories about emergency operations and blood and shit, in hushed, awful tones. Men, like the One Born Every Minute fainter, are even less informed, bound for their own version of that Birmingham floor.
Except these horror stories aren’t just shared because many births do not go to plan, but because these horrors are the elements that make a good story. Only very good friends would listen, rapt, to a tale of discomfort, boredom and exhausted relief, and then only once. Similar absences in conversation occur across all aspects of women’s healthcare: we are silent about our abortions, our miscarriages and our births, and sometimes it’s because they were bad, sometimes because they were good, and sometimes it’s because we don’t think anyone wants to hear.
One more thing…
A chicken in Thailand is thriving, despite having been decapitated. The vet who discovered him drops water and antibiotics straight into its neck hole. The awful thing is, I identify with both.
The trailer for the new series of The Handmaid’s Tale sees Offred in the back of a truck, wondering: ‘Is this what freedom looks like? What will happen when I get out? There probably is no out. Gilead is within you.’ There probably is no out. Oh God.
A male anglerfish’s first sexual adventure results in his becoming permanently fused, by his lips, to the side of a female. His skin becomes her skin. His major organs dissolve, his fins fall off and his blood becomes her blood, until all that’s left of him is a living set of testes. Since I learned this I’ve been in high demand to write my friends’ Tinder bios.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.ukor follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
