Last week I attended a presentation and booksigning by Barbara Kingsolver, whose newest book -- Animal, Vegetable, Miracle –- is a nonfiction account of her family's adventure growing and raising their own food supply for a full year. She read essays from the book, and in between narrated a slide show of their endeavors: planning, planting, canning, fixing up the farmhouse, and raising poultry. She ended the presentation with a story about the turkeys Americans are accustomed to eating: a specific variety that has been bred to be dumb as a stick and as stacked as Dolly Parton. This deformity has rendered the breed unable to naturally reproduce, (it topples and crushes its mate if it attempts fertilization).
For decades, most Americans' Thanksgiving turkeys have been bred by hand--a man's hand that extracts the sperm from the tom and inserts it in the hen. Kingsolver and her family bought some heirloom turkeys--Bourbon Reds--and had some trouble getting them to mate because they had imprinted on humans. When a hen was ready to mate, she performed her daffy fertility dance for the author's husband. It took a bit of intervention and staging to get the turkeys to consider each other. I had never before attended a literary event that culminated with a triumphant video of all natural turkey fuckin', let alone one where the audience was cheering.
So what does this have to do with freebirth? Give yourself over to my tortured analogy. A few days ago, I read this article about the budding freebirth movement. These women are eschewing even the company of a midwife in order to give birth at home totally unassisted. Why? Because women have been birthing babies for eons without the assistance of "professionals." Kinda like turkeys, before they were bred for industrialization.
As a community, freebirthers are generally distrustful of formality and standardization, attributes they associate with the cold, assembly-line drive of corporate hospitals.
Laura Shanley is the reining authority on the subject, having freebirthed five children, written Unassisted Birth, and launched a busy website on the topic.
"When you're afraid and you turn white, it's because you're telling your body 'danger,' and your body is taking your blood and oxygen and diverting it into your arms and legs to fight or run," Laura says, adding that the same thing can occur to a woman during birth. "So what happens to a frightened woman in labor is that her uterus is literally white, and it doesn't have the fuel it needs." This fear can be triggered by an unfamiliar maternity ward, or doctors or nurses performing uncomfortable procedures.
It's like you're having sex and someone knocks on the door, she explains, "or comes in and says, 'What's your Social Security number?'" It's a moment-killer, as they say, and blood flows away from the organs.
