Birth

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Birth

By 1960, American women were challenging the dominant medical model of childbirth from several political and religious perspectives. Today many "rituals" of hospital birth have changed as a result, and a vocal minority of women avoid the hospital altogether by giving birth at home or in birthing centers. Already in the 1950s, some women questioned what had become the conventional anesthetized hospital birth during which they lay alone on their backs with shaved pubic hair, hands strapped to a table, and legs in stirrups. They were encouraged by British obstetrician Grantly Dick-Read's (1890–1959) model of "natural childbirth" described in Childbirth without Fear (1959), which asserted that childbirth could be "spiritually uplifting." Women also joined grassroots organizations such as the La Leche League, begun in 1957 by a group of midwestern, middle-class Catholic women as a mother-to-mother support group that questioned medical attitudes toward childbirth and breast-feeding. In The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding (1958), the La Leche League urged mothers to ignore their doctors' orders about formula feeding and to breast-feed their babies, and advocated unanesthetized birth as an important benefit to a mother learning to nurse her baby. Religion played an important role in the turn of many Christian women to natural childbirth. In a religious context that was spawning the Christian Family Movement and other groups focused on family ethics, childbirth activists such as Helen Wessel (1924–), author of Natural Childbirth and the Christian Family (1963), argued that childbirth could prompt profound religious experiences.

Countercultural reformers who called for a return of childbirth to the home soon joined these more mainstream critics of medicalized birth. For example, Ina May Gaskin (1940–), a member of "The Farm," a Christian- and Buddhist-influenced alternative community in Tennessee, became renowned in the 1970s for her abilities as a home birth midwife, as documented in Spiritual Midwifery (1975). Feminism and the women's health movement soon brought a new perspective to childbirth reform, one that was decidedly less Christian. Feminist critics insisted on women's right to control over their birthing bodies, though many still insisted that childbirth was ripe with "spiritual" possibilities. The revitalization of midwifery in the United States was important for the growth of feminist interpretations of the spirituality of childbirth. The two national professional midwifery associations—the Midwives' Alliance of North America (MANA), formed in 1982; and the more medically mainstream American College of Nurse Midwives (ACNM), formed in 1955—both contend that birth is spiritually important for a birthing woman and her family and community. The emphasis that post-1960s midwifery placed on birth as not only a physical but also a spiritual event challenged medicalized portrayals of birth while drawing from deeply rooted midwifery traditions from various regions of the United States. Latina parteras in the Southwest, African-American grand-midwives in the South, and Amish midwives in Pennsylvania and the Midwest have all played important roles in sustaining alternatives to medical models of childbirth. Currently the legal status of midwifery and home birth varies throughout the United States. While certified nurse-midwives are legal throughout the country, most practice only in the hospital. Direct-entry (nonnurse) midwives, who constitute the majority of MANA and practice mostly in the home, are illegal in some states. Therefore, the religiously diverse home birth movement remains "underground" in many states.

With the exception of distinct religious communities such as the Amish and some New Age communal groups, religious traditions have rarely cared to articulate consensus about modes of birthing, despite the extensive network of religiously sponsored hospitals. However, women from a diversity of religions have seen childbirth as a religious act. For example, Jewish Reconstructionist rabbi Tikva Frymer-Kensky, author of Motherprayer (1995), and Lutheran pastor Margaret Hammer, author of A Spiritual Guide through Pregnancy (1997), have argued that with sufficient attention and preparation a woman can make her birth a religious experience, whether in the hospital or at home. Others—ranging from Marilyn Moran, a Catholic and author of Birth and the Dialogue of Love (1981); to Carol Balizet, Pentecostal author of Born in Zion (1996)—have insisted that childbirth be left in God's hands (with the husband as the chief earthly authority), to the point of advocating birth without medical or midwifery assistance. The meanings of childbirth are intimately tied to constructions of femininity and the maternal body, not all of which are shared by those working toward childbirth reform or those satisfied with medical models of birth. As a result, the religious meanings attributed to birth in America reflect all the diversity of American religion itself.

Bibliography

American College of Nurse-Midwives (ACNM). "ACNM Philosophy." Website: http://acnm.org.

Davis-Floyd, Robbie E. Birth as an American Rite of Passage. 1992.

Fraser, Gertrude. "Modern Bodies, Modern Minds: Midwifery and Reproductive Change in an African American Community." In Conceiving the New WorldOrder: The Global Politics of Reproduction, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp. 1995.

Klassen, Pamela E. Blessed Events: Religion and HomeBirth in America. Forthcoming.

Leavitt, Judith Walzer. Brought to Bed: Childbearing inAmerica, 1750 to 1950. 1986.

Midwives Alliance of North America (MANA). "MANA Core Competencies for Basis Midwifery Practice." Website: http://www.mana.org/manacore.html.

Rooks, Judith. Midwifery and Childbirth in America. 1997.

Wertz, Richard W., and Dorothy C. Wertz. Lying-In: AHistory of Childbirth in America. 1989.

Pamela E. Klassen

Contemporary American Religion