Brainwashing is integral to cult membership. Hence the last person I would ask if they belonged to a cult is a member. That’s why Brandy Zandrozny is not a reliable reporter on the cult of natural childbirth.
You may remember Brandy from an apologia for the terrible MANA homebirth statistics that she wrote for The Daily Beast in February. Now Brandy is back on the case with a new piece, Natural Childbirth is Not a Cult. Zadrozny is responding to a piece by Elissa Strauss at The Week. In discussing the unassisted childbirth reality TV show, Strauss makes the point, correctly in my view, that “the cult of natural childbirth has gone too far.”
To determine who is correct, we should start by considering the definition of a cult. According to Google, a cult is:
a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object.
In the case of natural childbirth, the object of veneration is unmedicated childbirth without interventions. Unmedicated vaginal birth is understood by cult members to be venerated with trust, worshipped with affirmations, and often viewed as more important that the ostensible purpose of childbirth, a live, healthy baby.
Natural childbirth, like most cults, has its own mythology, in this case a mythology that is both racist and sexist. The cult was started by Grantly Dick-Read, author of Childbirth Without Fear, and a eugenicist who was preoccupied with visions of “race suicide” as non-white people became an ever larger part of the population of first world countries. Dick-Read thought that white women of the “civilized” races were being diverted by the quest for economic and political equality, when they really should be home spitting out babies. He believed that it was fear of the excruciating pain of labor that discourage these women from having more children. He fabricated out of whole cloth the bizarre notion that “primitive” (read: black) women gave birth without pain because they didn’t fear childbirth and understood that their primary role was to reproduce.
To this day, natural childbirth advocates fantasize that they are emulating exotic brown foreigners and becoming better at birth than they are themselves. There is no historical basis to the claim that unmedicated vaginal birth is safest, and no scientific basis for the claim that it is superior in any way to childbirth with pain relief. No matter; cult membership requires belief regardless of inconvenient facts.
Zadrozny roll out all the cult tropes of natural childbirth as if that proves it isn’t a cult:
- Childbirth is not a contest, but it is “a defining moment” in the lives of many women
- Natural childbirth doesn’t mean rejection of care. It means care with a mother-focused doctor or midwife, sometimes in a place other than a hospital
- Many mothers cite safety as the reason for drug-free births, fearing a cascade of interventions like induction, synthetic hormones to speed labor, vaginal cutting, and caesarean section.
- One out of every three births in the U.S. is a cesarean section (as if this is somehow an indication that natural childbirth is better).
Zadrozny does not recognize the irony of vehemently denying the competitive nature of natural childbirth and the use of guilt to keep followers in line and non-followers second guessing their mothering skills, and then boasting:
My own son was born in a hospital without pain medication. I had the help of a midwife, a doula, and my husband. It was painful, sure, but it was agony with an end. I wasn’t vehemently against epidurals. I had done the math and decided if I wanted to be on my feet, during and quickly after the birth (a quarter of mothers who have caesareans describe (PDF) at least “quite a bit” of interference with routine activities in the two months after birth compared with 9 percent of mothers with a vaginal birth), if I wanted to avoid a catheter and major surgery, if I wanted to be out of the hospital and home with my babe sooner than later, it would be best to manage as much of the event as I could on my own.
QED, Brandy, QED.
Brandy ends with this admonition:
Rather than demonize the natural child birth movement, Lifetime, or these “extreme” mothers, let’s ask what has caused them to completely reject the system and figure out a way to make birth—wherever a woman chooses to do it—as safe as possible. Maybe we can even improve the current system so that laboring mothers feel more comfortable going to a hospital than into a forest.
Umm, Brandy, you seem to have missed the point of Strauss’ piece entirely. We know what causes them to completely reject the system: the worship of unmedicated vaginal birth, the veneration of “trusting birth,” the lies about the dangers of “interventions, and the lies about the health benefits of refusing those interventions.
In short, the cult of natural childbirth.
