fredarose:

I’m reading a book about midwifery in New England in the
eighteenth century and I’m struck by how pro-woman their treatment of birth was
compared to how it’s done today.

Like, it was the norm for labouring women to be surrounded
by a midwife and several female friends who all performed some kind of function
to aid the woman in delivering her baby safely. Male physicians hated the social tradition and dismissed
the gathering of women as facilitating “gossip” and as a hindrance on the rare
occasion they attended a birth.

The work of midwives was so valorised that many town maps
from this period clearly identify where every midwife was located, and paying
the midwife was one of the biggest household expenses alongside taxes.

Midwives developed their own manuscripts full of medicinal
remedies for all aspects of reproduction. Birth was managed by women
themselves – it was a collective female ritual.

Male obstetricians, motivated in my opinion by a deep-seated
envy of women’s reproductive power, began to steal and suppress women’s wisdom
around childbirth in the nineteenth century, and by the twentieth century unnecessary
medical intervention in childbirth had exploded.

We need to make childbirth woman-centred again.