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by Rachel Cusk Picador USA, 2001
by Ina May Gaskin Book Publishing Company, 2002 |
In Navel-Gazing, her cheekily titled memoir of pregnancy, Jennifer Matesa recounts a conversation with her midwife, Nancy. "Birth will change you," Nancy assures her. "You're not going to be the same after giving birth. This is a big deal."
Having babies has always been a big deal, but medical technology and a culture of choice afford many women the luxury of making a big deal of it. One reason pregnancy assumes such proportions is that Americans expect it to be a planned event. Though worries about biological clocks are still heard often enough, the traditional notion of a "childbearing age" is nearly obsolete, perhaps replaced by the metaphor of motherhood as maternity leave. That is, having babies does not occupy decades of female maturity, but is a project for a discrete slice of time taken off from other (often professional) pursuits. It is "intentional," in the idiom of the day.
A handful of recent books colorfully display these trends in childbearing. Written by professional women—academics, journalists, writers—they are noteworthy for their focus on "becoming" a mother—that is, on pregnancy. All reckon in some way with tensions between feminism and motherhood, simultaneously praising pregnancy and resisting the "essentialist" view of women as biologically determined baby-makers. Bookshelves already groan with works on pregnancy, dispensing advice on adding fiber to the diet, sterilizing formula bottles, and teaching baby to sleep the night. But as these writers justly lament, there is more to say about having a child, and it may be that the only way to get at this is to tell your own story.
Jennifer Matesa worked with a photographer colleague to produce Navel-Gazing. It is a diary with illustrations, mostly of the mother and her belly: pregnancy as a work of art. While the subject of her book began as an "accident," like the babies in several of these books, the notion that pregnancy is a choice so predominates that Matesa holds in reserve the possibility of a first-trimester abortion: "The idea keeps cropping up in the back of my mind that I could have an abortion. It's a relief to know that, if it gets too crazy and I discover that I'm just not cut out to do this, there are ways I could get out of it."
She doesn't abort but instead embarks on an adventure recognizable to many American women. The milestones and minor irritations of pregnancy, like food cravings, clumsiness, prenatal weigh-ins, ultrasounds, and epidurals are familiar enough in popular culture to win laughs in TV sitcoms. Last year, Friends relied on Rachel's (Jennifer Aniston) pregnancy to provide humor and move the story line along, ending the season with a special tear-jerking episode on the birth. The hospital setting of that episode reminds us that birth is usually a medical event in the United States. Academic treatments of American childbirth often excoriate this fact. The standard critique goes something like this: doctors treat the body as a machine, the female body as a defective or pathological one; hospital personnel force needless procedures in labor to keep deliveries efficient, appear indispensable, and generate profits.
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by Jennifer Matesa Three Rivers Press, 2001
by Cristina Mazzoni Cornell Univ. Press, 2002 |
Women unhappy with obstetric care can seek out a midwife instead, as Matesa and two of the other writers considered here opted to do. A leading association of midwives, the Midwives' Alliance of North America, describes childbirth as a healthy part of a woman's lifecycle and eschews unnecessary interventions in delivery. As health-care costs escalate, midwifery is gaining support in many quarters as a safe, humane way to handle low-risk pregnancies. Even some obstetricians now share their practices with nurse-midwives. (Births by midwife still make up only a small percentage of the nearly 4 million annual deliveries in the United States, but have risen from a negligible few in the 1980s to about 10 percent by 1998.)
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