Tina Cassidy - Birth: a History

Birth

The Surprising History of How We Are Born

Tina Cassidy

Copyright 2006 by Tina Cassidy

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cassidy, Tina.

Birth : the surprising history of how we are born / Tina Cassidy.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. )

ebook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4622-0
1. ChildbirthHistory. I. Title.
RG651.C37 2006
618.2dc22 20006047589

Atlantic Monthly Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

Distributed by Publishers Group West

www.groveatlantic.com

For the Damaschi women and the Flint boys

AFTER I HAD a baby in 2004, the women of my family gave me three things: newborn outfits, advice, and accounts of their own birth experiences.

The last was the impetus for this book.

My grandmother, Genevieve Damaschi, who bore three girls in the 1940s and 50s, explained how she was gassed during the birth of her first daughter, slipping in and out of consciousness on a stretcher in the hallway of Hartford Hospital. She screamed. The nurses told her to shut up. She didnt see the baby for three days, per standard hospital infection-prevention policy. My grandfather was barred from the room while she labored.

My mother, who had me in 1969, recounted in a ten-second sound bite an equally frightening story of her five-hour labor and delivery ordeal.

They shaved my pubic area. They gave me an enema. They made me walk around the room a couple of times. They gave me a shot. I woke up three hours later standing on the gurney in excruciating pain. The doctor came in, gave me another shot, and then the next thing I know, you were born.

Did they use forceps? I asked.

I think that they did, because of the condition that your head was in.

You dont know if they used forceps?

Id like to get those records, she said, sounding sort of dreamy, her mind stuck in the labor room where she, too, delivered alone, no husband or family allowed. Scopolamine, she said. It makes you not remember what happened. I pretty much slept through it.

When she was about to have my brother in 1976, my mother skeptically attended Lamaze classes, which then were in vogue. There she learned how to breathehee hee huhhhhand her husband was prepped to witness the birth, a relatively new idea at the time. Though her natural delivery of me should have been proof that she could deliver this second child vaginally, her doctor gave her an X-ray to determine if her petite pelvis could allow for my brother to pass through. The doctor said her pelvic width was borderline and after just a couple of hours of normal labor, suggested a cesarean section. Unhappy with her first birth experience, she leaped at the opportunity. Spouses were almost never allowed in the operating room then. So my mother delivered alone. Again.

My youngest aunt had her first child in 1982, just as natural childbirth methods were peaking, a feminist backlash against the highly controlled births my mother and grandmother had gone through. Hers was the most unusual of all the Damaschi womens labors to date, because her husband witnessed the whole event. But the birth of her second child, in a Catholic hospital in 1989, did not go as well as the first. Because of long-held religious beliefs that it is a womans station in life to suffer during laborsays so right there in the Biblethe facility did not allow for any pain relief. She was left alone in a room for hours, the baby facing backward in the birth canal, and she tore mightily at the end.

Despite all, I had high hopes for how the birth of my son, at a major hospital in the medical mecca of Boston, would unfold. I purposely chose a female obstetrician. Armed with a birth plan, the latest fad in obstetrical empowerment, I knew I would sail through labor wearing my favorite black spaghetti-strap night-gownno johnnie for me! The lights would be dim, an epidural anesthetic juicing my spine only if absolutely necessary. I had written down my instructions for the nurses to read so that even if I was in too much pain to explain it to them myself, my plan would be clear.

An instructor at the hospitals prenatal class told us that the episiotomy, a cut to make the opening of the birth canal wider, was no longer routinely performed by their obstetricians because they now knew that the incisions often caused more problems than they solved. The doctors also had abandoned stirrups because they had learned that having women lie flat with their legs in the air negates the powerful force of gravity for pushing out the baby. They said they didnt routinely employ forceps anymore, which can injure the mother and child. And the doctors had stopped objecting to squatting, which opens the pelvis, an ancient practice that had been rediscovered after disappearing in the prudish Victorian era.

My husband and I felt blessed to have the latest thinking at our disposal. But after ten hours of labor and another four hours of pushing, the very busy obstetrician making rounds that night told us matter-of-factly that our son had not rotated all the way, and was stuck. I asked to have a midwife come and offer suggestions to move my labor along, but the harried staff said she was unavailable. I asked them to shut off the epidural (yes, I had succumbed the fifth time the nurse asked me if I wanted one), so that I could try other labor positions. They obliged but only, I think, because they were annoyed and knew the pain would be so severe I wouldnt care what happened next. Indeed, that was true.

My sons heart rate was fine, but things had dragged on too long, as far as the staff was concerned. The doctor insisted upon an emergency C-sectionwhich was performed with the speed of a SWAT teamthroughout which I vomited and shook violently, while my poor husband clung to my side of the operating curtain, careful not to glimpse my uterus, which rested outside my abdomen while the doctor stitched it. The next morning, my still-ashen spouse, grateful everyone was alive and the baby was perfect, cornered the doctor, wanting to know if the ordeal had really been necessary.

What did they do in that situation before there were C-sections? he wanted to know.

The baby would have died in the birth canal, the doctor said. They would have had to wait for it to disintegrate, or they would try to get it out some other way, drilling a hole in the fetal head, emptying the contents and collapsing the skull, before it started to poison the mother.

Well, then.

I caught this response as I shuffled out of the bathroom on my way back to bed. Too weak to react, I gingerly climbed beneath the blanket and filed a mental note to see if that was true. If I had lived five hundred years ago I drifted into a fitful, clammy, bloated sleep, my body pumped even larger with fluids than it had been before the birth, while little George, softer and sweeter than heaven, lay wrapped up like a burrito in the crook of my arm, where I longed to keep him forever.