Yesterday I wrote about the racist origins of the philosophy of natural childbirth.
The idea that “primitive” women feel no pain in childbirth and that the pain that Western women experience can be attributed to the “fear-tension-pain cycle” originated with obstetrician Grantly Dick-Read. If you doubt that his fabricated claims were based on racism, you only have to read his own words:
Natural childbirth philosophy is fundamentally and ineradicably racist.
The primitive knows that she will have little trouble when her child is born… Natural birth is all that she looks for; there are no fears in her mind; …she has no knowledge of the tragedies of sepsis, infection and hemorrhage. To have conceived is her joy; the ultimate result of her conception is her ambition…
…Two, three or four percent of some tribes [died] without any sadness . . . realizing if they were not competent to produce children for the spirits of their fathers and for the tribe, they had no place in the tribe.
While contemporary natural childbirth advocates are either ignorant of or choose to ignore the racist origins of their philosophy, academic feminists have been studying how the racialization of pregnant bodies lies at the heart of natural childbirth philosophy, from its beginnings to the present day.
Rachelle Chadwick explores the racist and classist assumptions in her book Bodies that Birth: Vitalizing Birth Politics.
In the present day, racist and imperialist prejudices about women’s birthing bodies continue to underpin contemporary rhetoric about biomedicalization, ‘natural childbirth’ and rights-based discourse advocating for women’s right to choice and control. These underlying assumptions are rarely recognized or acknowledged. Colonial ideas about indigenous and black women’s bodies as primitive and animal-like and thus primed to give birth (and breastfeed) easily and without pain or the need for medical assistance, are rooted in ideologies of racial difference and Social Darwinism
Grantly Dick-Read’s racist beliefs persist among leaders and laypeople in the natural childbirth movement:
Colonial myths about easy and painless birth for so-called ‘primitive’ women also continue to frame and are used to legitimize the (largely middle-class and Euro-American) ‘natural birth’ movement and meta-narrative…
These racist myths play an outsize role in homebirth and freebirths:
These racist assumptions continue to resonate in contemporary discourse about homebirth, natural birth and unassisted birth or what has become known as ‘free birth’ in the form of the caricature of the ‘Third World,’ rural or ‘primitive’ woman who does not require biomedical assistance but gives birth alone and without medical intervention… [T]he ‘primitive’ woman, “haunts western women’s birth stories” as a romanticized, racist ideal that valorizes the power of the instinctive, pure or ‘natural’ birthing body …
The trope of the primitive woman who approaches the birth of her baby in an ‘uncomplicated’ fashion, with a “built-in knowledge of childbirth” and “without fear” has been found to inspire and embolden women’s decisions to birth outside the medical system (i.e. homebirth or unassisted birth) and pervade the talk of women planning homebirths.
Chadwick argues that the philosophy of natural childbirth continues to be fundamentally racist:
The call to return to ‘authentic’ birth and “natural selves” while ostensibly neutral, is actually an implicitly racially marked project aimed at predominantly white and privileged women.
This ongoing racism has real and deadly consequences for black women in industrialized countries. The natural childbirth movement, having conjured a racialized pregnant body as inherently “perfectly designed” for birth, elides the fact that black women are much more likely to die in childbirth than white women. To the extent that the tragedies of black pregnant women have been recognized by white women, it is to exploit those tragedies to argue – falsely and disingenuously – that black women need more of what white women want: intervention-free unmedicated vaginal birth, midwives and doulas.
But black women in industrialized countries are not dying because of too many interventions. They are dying because they don’t have access to the very interventions that white natural childbirth advocates deride. Black women die preventable deaths during pregnancy and childbirth because they need more high tech care — medical specialists, perinatologists, ICUs — not less.
The bottom line is that the contemporary philosophy of natural childbirth is fundamentally and ineradicably racist. It is long past time that the natural childbirth movement acknowledge its racist underpinnings and excise its racist assumptions about “unhindered,” “instinctual”, “natural” birth.
I’m not holding my breath. The racist trope of “the primitive woman who approaches the birth of her baby … without fear” is central to natural childbirth and beloved of privileged white natural childbirth advocates; racism be damned.
