Women’s agony is sexy.
Consider the latest images making the rounds under the headline Photographer Makes Statement Against Caesareans In Brazil By Capturing Girlfriend’s Home Birth. For example:
If you did not know that this woman was in labor, you might confuse the images with pornographic images of sexual ecstasy. That’s not a coincidence. The image is childbirth porn.
As C.K. Egbert noted a powerful, thought provoking piece entitled Eve’s punishment rebooted: The ideology of natural birth published last year on the website Feminist Current:
[pullquote align=”right” color=”#fc4847″]Women’s agony is sexy.[/pullquote]
There’s something pornographic about the way we depict childbirth. A woman’s agony becomes either the brunt of a joke, or else it is discussed as an awesome spiritual experience… [W]e talk about the pain of childbirth — with few exceptions, the most excruciating, exhausting, and dangerous ordeal within human experience — as valuable in and of itself. Hurting women is sexy.
Wait! Aren’t women empowered by unmedicated birth?
Egbert doesn’t think so:
When people tout “natural birth” as an “empowering choice” (sound familiar?), they conveniently ignore all the women who have been harmed by these practices and for whom giving birth was (completely understandably and legitimately) one of the worst experiences of their lives. Natural birth advocates, just like many in the pro-sex movement, don’t seem to be concerned about the harm that women suffer through this practice or finding ways of preventing this harm from occurring. Women can choose, as long as they choose to suffer and see themselves as liberated through suffering.
It’s almost as if she knew the photographer’s reasons for publicizing these photos. Gustavo Gomes claims:
Our country has the highest caesarean rates in the world – around 50% of births in the public health system and shockingly 87% in the private system.
“Most of them are with no medical reasons, just because c-sections can be scheduled and are quicker for the doctors to operate.
“[W]e hope that these photos can demystify natural and home childbirths and encourage future mothers to avoid unnecessary c-sections.”
So Gomes publicized intimate images of his girlfriend’s agony to convince Brazilian women to make “better” birth choices. He believes, as Egbert predicted, that women can choose “as long as they choose to suffer and see themselves as liberated through suffering.”
Egbert rejects the notion that childbirth porn is good for women:
Natural birth advocates are not concerned with women’s welfare, because they are not advocating for safer and more effective forms of pain management; they argue they should be eliminated, because women’s suffering is itself a good… [T]he danger of anesthetic only becomes an issue — rather than a normalized part of medical treatment — only when and because it can be used to hurt women.
As she noted in the comments to her piece:
…[T]his isn’t about the best way to give birth. It’s about what significance we give to women’s suffering and pain, and how that relates to women’s subordination in general.
Why does Gomes think it is his prerogative to preach to women about the “right” way to give birth? Who is he to claim that women should not have the choice of elective C-section on request?
Here’s how I feel about that:
The bottom line is that Gomes isn’t normalizing unmedicated vaginal birth; he’s normalizing women’s suffering.
The inevitable result? According to Egbert:
If we normalize women’s suffering and refuse to provide palliative care, that is what women will expect. That is what they already are told to expect, given that they are socialized from infanthood to believe that their bodies are things to be used and hurt by men. They are bullied, coerced, told they are selfish or wimps or bad mothers. This ideology is pernicious in two ways. First, this will remove the motivation for finding safer and more effective means of pain management during birth. Second, if this ideology gains enough traction, we will likely regress to a society — as the UK has already done to a great extent — where women are systematically denied pain medication during birth.
