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Resexualizing Childbirth.
by Leilah McCracken

In the months following the birth of my sixth child, I went on a
sometimes amazing, sometimes agonizing voyage of self-discovery:
this birth was the catalyst of a fantastic change--I went from what
felt like less than fully female to robust, voluptuous, womanly.

This only makes sense--the ultimate female act is giving birth, and
the births I gave before my sixth were coercive, violent, not, for
the most part, an act of a woman; but the output of an attachment,
of a medical machine, of a pitocin drip, an epidural catheter, a
prostaglandin smear. (Will I want to tell my grandchildren that I
had pig semen in me? Will this be something that women of the late
twentieth century will want to leave in their legacies: pig semen
and extracts from cows' brains and mares' urine to jostle our bodies
into bizarre birthing hormonal overdrive?)

 Yes, I had given birth, but it wasn't female birth--it was electrode
 birth, clinical birth, irrational birth, cruel birth. It was
 immodest birth--strapped to a bed, and under cold steel and white
 lights. The first birth given by me was one that I now shudder to
 think of. Me, at barely twenty, giving birth with teams of medical
 students observing my vulva and fingering me at will. Me! I couldn't
 even dress in front of my new husband without shame and fear. Me.

I learned over the years and births that followed that there is
indeed, as the truism states, "no modesty in the delivery room." I
learned to check my modesty, my pride, my independence, and my
individuality at the "welcome" mat of the hospital's front door.

Well hot damn, when I got pregnant with my sixth I just couldn't
do it anymore. A warm, decisive force was in me, quietly telling
me my moves, and instructing me to move as quickly away from the
medical model of birth--and life--as possible. It was so hard
sometimes, but I managed to trust. Even when the pregnancy grew so
long, 44 weeks, I managed to trust in birth.

Then the birth came, so easy, so beautiful, and for the first time,
I was not once hooked up to a machine. I was not once penetrated
by hooks, needles, or knives. I was radiant, blissful. I looked in
a mirror once--I glowed! In every hospital birth I'd ever had,
fitful, sagging sobbing was my most usual course; and I always
thought it was hormonal. No, the glow was hormonal, the sobbing was
a sign that I was in a very wrong place, in the wrong time in history
for giving birth. (Oh yeah. Name a worse time--you can't. No woman
can go into a hospital birth now without needless intervention.) I
just pushed my baby out and went to bed--my bed--after drinking
from my own cups and peeing in my own toilet. Then I cuddled up
under my own covers with my husband and new baby. This birth changed
me. Before, I was gray; a vital connection hadn't been made that
illuminated my pure colors for me.

But then, I gave birth as a woman--fully female, only my own hormones,
no trauma or sadness, just sweetly sensual, rich magnificence.
That's how I felt that day--so beautiful and powerful, sexy, and
in love. I managed to keep myself in gentle hums for about two
months. Then the magnitude of what had happened hit me: in all my
other births I had been raped. I only knew it was rape when I finally
had a birth that was not.

Then I realized that if it took me six births to understand what
birth is meant to be, what about all the women having their first
or second babies (or third, fourth, fifth)? They would never know
birth's simple beauty when almost every part of our culture encourages
them to remain stringently within the medical machine. I would see
pregnant women and my heart would break--so much I needed to tell
them! I was learning the true extent of hospital birth horrors;
learning that procedures we assume to be safe are really just a lot
of unproven obstetrical trends used to the point of ritual. The
dangers of it all astounded me; the rape of it all seared me--I was
full of burning truths, and wrenching reality: it was enough to
keep me up at night.

 Then I began to write. What started it all was the College of
 Midwives of British Columbia's usual jab at Gloria Lemay, my birth
 friend. I wrote to them, then to my government, then made the
 petition; then I found that the words just kept coming. I put up
 my website. When more words came, more truth came--and the most
 staggering one, for me, was that birth is an inherently sexual
 event. It is pure hormone, heat, and radiant love. And just as sex
 can be desecrated into rape, so can birth. I wrote lots about that
 realization.

The work that came from my own synthesis of birth = sex (as well
as birth/sex = spirit) was to be a book. I want the words out, I'm
sick of them stagnating in my hard drive.

--From OBCNews, Issue 16.3, Sept. 21, 1999, The Birth Love Column,
by Leilah McCracken; reprinted with permission of Leilah McCracken.
To order Resexualizing Childbirth, please send a check for $15
(U.S.) or $22 (Cdn.) (includes S&H) to VIRTUAL Xpressions.com,
Leilah's publishing company, at 1416 Winslow Avenue, Coquitlam BC,
Canada V3J 2G6. For more information about the book, and to see
reviews by, among others, Nancy Wainer, Barbara Harper, Jeannine
Parvati Baker and Cher Mikkola of Midwifery Today magazine, go to
Leilah's website, http://www.birthlove.com/pages/resex.html