Shocker
I’m amazed.
The Guardian has a great big long piece on childbirth and it uses the taboo word “women” throughout. I could hardly believe what I was reading. Not one single mention of “people who identify as” or “and non-binary people” or just plain “people” where it should be “women.” There are mentions of parents but only where it makes sense, not where it glaringly obviously doesn’t.
“It’s lovely to know other mums hitting the same hurdles as you, so you don’t feel alone,” says Sinead Knights, 38, a travel industry manager from Manchester who did NCT classes in October 2023. She describes them as “a space to share ideas and ask questions and not feel judged” and says she meets up with the mothers from her group weekly. “Hopefully, our babies will be friends for a long time, as the mums will as well,” Knights says.
That’s in the GUARDIAN. Can you believe it? Other mums, mothers, mums.
Childbirth, said Dick-Read, is not inherently painful. It hurt when women – usually educated women in western countries – felt fear, through what he called the “fear‑tension-pain syndrome”. If women relaxed and stopped worrying about childbirth, they could have painless, unmedicated births. Dick-Read became the NCT’s first president and his teachings were enthusiastically promoted by middle-class women, who met at antenatal groups in each other’s homes.
See what I mean? Openly discussing childbirth as something that women do. No pause to include our enby siblings, just women women women.
And it’s all like that, paragraph after paragraph. The word “women” appears 44 times.
Something has shifted.
I hope that there are plenty of screenshots to capture this version before the activists get their grubby little hands on it.
Of course, Dick-Read was utterly and completely wrong about the pain. Labour hurts, however relaxed a delivering mother might be. Some women find it easier to bear than others do; we’re all different. Some women have easy periods whilst others are in crippling agony for days every month. The only time I found the actual moment of delivery to be at all painful – and it is one of the two occasions in my life when the pain was so bad that I was desperate to die rather than endure any more – was when my second baby (footling breech*) was delivered by the emergency use of forceps, with no opportunity for anyone to administer any pain relief whatsoever. On all the other occasions, the moment of delivery marked a cessation of pain (at least until the afterpains started).
Dick-Read did women no favours in implying that labour pain was our own fault, especially since HE was never going to be in a position to find out what it’s really like. He was also wrong about it being anything to do with culture or geography. For crying out loud, one of the oldest books in existence describes how labour is agony for mothers! We could hardly say that ancient Hebrew women were middle-class Westerners!
*After the waters broke prematurely, I had been in hospital for ten days on strict bed rest, whilst I was given drugs to delay labour as long as possible. He had been assessed by the obstetrician the day before as having his head nicely engaged. I told the delivery team that he had somersaulted overnight (something all of mine were able to do throughout each pregnancy) but they didn’t believe it possible, and one told me that she could feel his nose!
Yes, I hope it’s the start of a pattern and not just that the Commissar in charge was off on lunch or something, otherwise the writer will be forced to denounce themselves and submit to re-education.
tigger, my thoughts exactly. I went through Lamaze when I was pregnant because it was the only way they would allow my husband in the delivery room, but I found a lot of their claims questionable, and some of them all the way to cringe worthy.
But if you can come up with a way to attribute something to western colonial patriarchy, invented for western women, you can probably make a lot of money peddling it.
Hey, what if I start writing books and pamphlets claiming that the need to eat is a cultural imperative imposed by western colonialist powers on the rest of the world? If we hadn’t imposed such an imperative, no one would starve in poor countries anymore, because they would return to our natural, authentic state of not eating!
iknklast, I think Inedia, the breatharian cult, beat you to that idea.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inedia
AoS, yeah, I’m familiar with the breatharians; I sort of stole their idea, but since I didn’t say they’d live on air, it isn’t quite stealing, right? ;-)
It’s a loophole worth exploiting. I say go for it.