Choices available for next step in life

By: Rachel Spitler

Posted: 5/30/08

I've been thinking a lot about pregnancy lately, even though the subject isn't directly relevant to my life just yet.

With the recent passage of Mother's Day and the subsequent time spent among my siblings and their young children, it's inevitable that kids would be on my mind a little.

To make it even more personal, I recently had a long and fascinating conversation with a friend who happens to be a professional midwife.

Then I went to a baby shower. The universe is laying it on thick, huh?

That's okay. Eventually being a mom has always been a big part of my plan for myself. Now that I'm married, the logistics of that goal have become clearer, and the time is fast approaching.

Just one more year of schoolwork, and I'll be moving on to the stage of my life where I alternately bring babies and novels into the world.

That gives me a little while yet, but I've lived just enough years to have figured out that they're not very long. So while I'm continuing to wholeheartedly enjoy my classes, part of my mind is starting to be occupied with the concerns of my impending adventure.

Weirdly enough, one of the things I've been discovering is that these concerns are not very popular. I don't mean that there aren't resources available, because there certainly are. I mean that the average person on the street doesn't seem to think about pregnancy often or know very much about it.

Now that we've left the dark age when "pregnant" was nearly a swear word, popular culture has spent a long time being mainly concerned with expectant mothers as vehicles for dramatic tension.

If a pregnant woman appears on your TV screen, for instance, there's a pretty good chance she's in her third trimester - even on an airplane or something where that wouldn't make sense - and if that's the case, she's almost certainly going to go into labor at the worst possible time for the other characters, probably in a stuck elevator or something.

This trend is starting to change, though. I'm currently on a kick where if somebody asks me about my favorite Disney character, I bring up Chicha, the round-bellied "lady with a baby" from "The Emperor's New Groove." She's cute, she's smart, she's hilarious and she gives birth off-camera.

Her "condition" isn't a contrived plot point; it's just a human state, part of the normal transition period between having two kids and having three kids.

I'm happy that depictions like this are starting to become more common. I hope they continue enough to finally balance out that strange period of stock-characterization.

It would be fun to see more movies like "Juno" - there's a huge and nearly untapped potential here for the "pregnancy comedy" as a subgenre. That would be interesting to see.

Getting back to real life, though, I am also happy to have learned from my midwife friend that, as time goes on, women are gaining more and more options about exactly how pregnancies are managed and monitored, not to mention how they give birth.

We've come a long way from the mid-1900s, when childbirth practices were geared almost entirely toward the convenience of doctors rather than the benefit of mothers.

It was popular then to tie a woman in labor down with straps and to give her drugs like ether as a matter of course. When my oldest brother was born, my dad wasn't even allowed in the delivery room until well after the process was complete.

These things have changed, but we've still got a long way to go. It remains common for women to unquestioningly deliver on their backs, struggling upward against gravity and for procedures like episiotomy to be performed even when they're not strictly necessary.

Historically, most movements for reproductive justice have been primarily concerned with abortion and contraception rather than with actually having babies. My women studies class talked a little about the "medicalization" of birth, and its treatment by professionals as almost a disease, but the story of how that's been fought against is harder to track than most of the rest of feminist history.

However it happened, things have gotten better.

We are now living in a pretty remarkable time and place for giving birth, one in which someone like me can look up and down a vast scale of options.

If I want, I can go to the hospital, get an epidural and sleep through my contractions so the obstetrician has to wake me up to push. Or I can call up my midwife friend and have her deliver the baby on my sofa, then experience an endorphin rush and intense bonding time.

I could even go for the extremes of hard/white/sterile or squatting-in-the-bushes. I could head to a "birthing center" and go through the whole process immersed in warm water. Maybe someday it will be feasible to give birth in zero-gravity.

If any of these options sound undesirable to you, then you are well-equipped to understand why such a variety of choices is a good thing.

For most of human history, clean hospital environments were virtually nonexistent; and in modern times, there have been movements to illegalize midwifery and home birth altogether. But for this moment and in this place, we have the amazing privilege of choice.

I don't know yet what I'm going to do and probably won't decide until partway through my first pregnancy - and then again with my second, and so on.

What I do know is that I have the opportunity to take the option I personally like the most, the one that sounds best and smartest for my body, my emotions and my particular baby.

I like that feeling, and I hope that this kind of access to choice is quick in spreading across the world. Most of us aren't in a position to help with that directly - and three cheers for those who are - but we can at least keep these things in our minds.

If we simply remember that birth happens every day, and that it ought to be valued - if we keep making movies about positive, realistic mother figures - then even such a minute cultural shift can make it easier for those capable of instituting greater changes to do their job.

Meanwhile, onward with school for me. It may be too early to change my brand of vitamins, but dang if I'm not gonna be a smart mommy.

And I hope that freedom makes its way around the world too.

Rachel Spitler is a junior in English. The opinions expressed in her columns do not necessarily represent those of the Daily Barometer staff. Spitler can be reached at forum@dailybarometer.com.