Ina May’s Guide To Childbirth by Ina May Gaskin

I’ve done something (read something) that may well have long term repercussions socially, personally and perhaps even professionally: even though I have a firmly and irrevocably (in the current world) wombless body, I have now read sooooo many books and attended soooo many classes about giving birth that I am genuinely worried that I may have accidentally educated myself into that worst possible point of the Dunning-Kruger graph… And as – aside from witnessing my long term partner go through the process at some point in the next few weeks – I will likely never do any more study of the process, I may end up forever perched at the pinnacle of that initial peak of rockstar confidence and rockstar ignorance.

I am terrified that I will begin to assert the opinions of the hippie midwives I have listened to and learned from as if they are irrevocable and universally accepted facts.

I am worried that I have taken all this deeply onboard, finding in the pages and thinking of writers like Ina May Gaskin an ideology that matches my personal politics and opinions, that “feels right” and is – of course, I’m not a fool – wildly bourne out by statistics as evidentially true (or at least not evidentially false) and I am worried, truly, deeply, majorly worried, that I will speak these opinions, these statistics, these ideas, as if I know anything about them to someone on the cusp of labour, and be read as callous, patronising, arrogant and ignorant. And, the thing is, I probably would be! Regardless of intention, I probably would be!

And I fear that even in summarising or commenting on this book, I’m going to be doing it here!

I have a useless, empty body that has no right to opinions on any of these meaningful physical acts (gestation and birth). But it’s interesting and important and I want to know about it, even though I can never do it, and thus never do anything of any value with my body at all.

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Ina May Gaskin was (is, maybe?) a pioneering (if that’s an appropriate word to use) midwife who popularised (or, arguably, repopularised) the essential pre-medical tenets of giving birth: people don’t have to be knocked out to do it, people don’t need to be given drugs as standard to do it, stress makes everything harder (including childbirth), any medical intervention during the labouring process almost always necessitates – or is used to justify – additional medical interventions, and the more medical interventions take place, the more risk there is…

Ina May has taught me – in a way that I am unlikely to change my mind about as I’m not going to read an ob/gyn’s book on the importance of pathology-centred birthing support any time soon – that peace, that love, that community (I can definitely offer my lover one of those and probably a second (the one I can’t do is community, I don’t have a community)) is best…

It has taught me that bodies are safest when not surprised or stressed or overstretched in labour… That people give birth more healthily when they have witnessed others give birth before, rather than – as is the case for many, many, many people nowadays – the first birth one ever sees as an adult is one that’s occuring to your own body, or the body of someone you are incredibly close to (or had been nine months ago, or are related to and feel obliged to attend, etc etc etc)…

Ina May writes at length about the fact that “no one ever talks about how birth can be orgasmic”, and maybe no one was talking about this when this book was first published a little under a couple of decades ago, but oooooooh yes yes yes yes I’ll have what she’s having they’re talking about it now…

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Ina May’s Guide To Childbirth is about birth as a natural process, about birth as an inherently sexual process, about how nipple, clitoral and labial (facial and genital) stimulation is a great way to expedite and ease the passage of the baby.

It’s a book about kissing and touching and loving and being loved.

Yes, it’s all on the edge of yonic-construct worshipping paganism, but maybe that’s somewhere more of us should be, more of the time… Maybe many of the conspicuous holes in our phallocentric world would be repaired if we looked at our societies more as something that could bring forth life and futurity, rather than as something that can solely fuck…

#patriarchyinnit

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This book opens with ~150 pages of four hundred to a thousand word descriptions of giving birth, most of which – though not all – took place at the commune Ina May ran for many decades.

These are mostly (and rightly so!) documents prepared by people who experienced labour firsthand, but dotted amongst them are testaments, witness testimonies, from people who watched someone, or supervised someone, or cared for someone, going through labour themselves.

As I mentioned, I have a functionally useless body (oh, yeah, sure, semen made in my big testes fertilised an egg (a human egg), but as that’s something physically capable of being meaninglessly executed by the vast majority of all the worst people I’ve ever met, being also able to do that is essentially an embarrassment and thus a greater source of shame…)

(((… I always thought if I ever raised a child it would be adopted or fostered or a step-child or something, where I’d get to have a genuine sense as to whether any affection had been earned or deserved (as most people are blinded by nuclear family centric propaganda and unable to judge blood relatives in the way they would judge strangers or peers, the babies)… having a genuine biological child feels inherently regressive and politically suspect… I know terrible people who have affection towards their terrible relatives… I hope that my child becomes someone who sees meaningful ethics as more important than familial ties. I would rather they grow to hate me for my shittiness, rather than never notice it. I mean, ideally I will grow sufficiently as a person in the world for them to not need to hate me, but I’m nearly 40 (I’m 35) and I don’t really have much meaningful going on for now so realistically it’s fucking unlikely at this point.)))

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Ina May’s Guide To Childbirth is anecdote and narrative, and it made me feel sad that although the route to birth that has been selected by my lover and me is as progressive (i.e. the most pre-medical) as is available on the NHS in South London, it’s still taking place within the same physical building as where all the most pathologised births in that district are taking place, and that we don’t have the important, long-standing, complex mutually beneficial community that Ina May’s writes about and ultimately sells at length…

Ina May writes about how making out, how physical touch, how coming, how being present and sexual and, baby, alive, baby, are the best tools for a comfortable, easy, birth…

Is it all too 1970s, this idea, is it too stuck in this brief beautiful moment of hope for love, back when everyone could have free love communes where everyone slept on the floor (the best place to sleep) and no one had AIDS and the dating apps that commodify human relationships didn’t exist and you could kiss and touch and love and then someone else who you also kissed and touched and loved could kiss and touch and love the birthing person while you went for a pee/coffee/low ABV supermarket lager..?

A birth site as worship of the yonic deity seems right…

Any birth site that is not a worship of the yonic deity seems wrong but now is so so normal…

Has Ina May made me an evangelist? Maybe. Has Ina May made me a believer? Maybe, yes, too…

An important book. But, sure, maybe debatable.

But I’m not going to read the opposite side. I don’t need to believe that it won’t all be fine.