Get Me Out, by Randy Hutter Epstein, M.D. #1
It is really difficult to be modest when you are having a baby. People see things you quite possibly have never seen yourself, and there is nothing you can do to stop them. Some people make videos of the happy occasion, so then everyone can watch the miracle taking place (although I am told that some hospitals no longer allow this, lest the video eventually be used in a malpractice lawsuit). I cannot say that I was one bit tempted to have my labor experience videotaped, although I do feel a little be regretful that we didn’t take any photos of Baby Girl right when she was born. I see other people with photos of their newborns being weighed or getting their first bath, and I think we will be a little more proactive next time around.
This book is fascinating so far, and also a bit horrifying. I have read Part 1, which takes us through this history of human childbirth, from Eve through the era of U.S. slavery. As it turns out, it IS possible to preserve your modesty while giving birth – they used to place a sheet over the woman, and tie it around the male doctor’s neck. Yup – he delivered the baby without looking, and sometimes he did this with tools. And women trusted him to do it, because by that time male doctors had pushed female midwives out of the birthing room, but I am getting ahead of myself.
I remember one year around Christmas, I watched a documentary about how it must have been for Mary on the night she gave birth to Jesus (I tried to look it up for you, but didn’t have any luck). They showed the teen-aged Mary standing on bricks, holding onto a rope that was suspended from the ceiling. Women were all around her – Joseph was nowhere to be found – talking her through the birth. It was quite lovely, the way her birth was depicted – I wish I had saved it so I could watch it again. I think that more women would choose drug-free deliveries if they had other women around to guide them through, and I also think we would be less afraid of giving birth if we knew we would be surrounded by other women who had successfully gone through childbirth when it was our turn.
That said, I wanted my sister in the room with me (and she would have been if my baby had not decided to come a few days early), and my husband, but I really didn’t want anyone else in there (the modesty thing, you know). But when I was actually in labor, I didn’t really notice who was in the room. There was a nurse who kept telling me not to push (I wrote about this last week), and other nurses who kept running in the room because I was screaming so loudly. Other than that, Baby Girl could have arrived to a huge audience and I still have no recollection of it. When I finally got to push her out, it was just me, her, Hubby, and the doctor who caught her, and I had tuned everyone else out. I think maybe I would have been less hysterical had I been surrounded by experienced mothers.
So how did men take over childbearing? Well, for one thing, they invented tools that midwives did not have or use, and convinced people that it would be safer for them to be involved in case the baby got stuck in the birth canal. I can attest to this today – OBs DO spend time terrifying first-time mothers by warning them of potential complications. They tell us that our pelvis “has not been tested” and so it’s possible that the baby might get stuck, in which case the baby can be damaged unless we have a C-section. Up to one in three births are by C-section now, according to the woman who ran our Lamaze class. They also accused women of being witches if they attended the delivery of a baby who later died, which, after a few women were sentenced to death, surely discouraged others from being birth attendants. They also touted their fancy educations (which rarely included any training in obstetrics in the early days) as being superior to midwives, who trained on-the-job and who couldn’t necessary read. I came to like my OB, and I was happy with the others that practice with him (he is the only male, and I chose the practice because of the two female doctors – naturally the one male would be on call at my delivery), but reading this section made me angry, and made me want to choose a midwife next time.
The most horrific part of this section was about the doctor (I won’t name him) who learned how to sew up tears in the womb by practicing on young slave women – he did not believe in anesthesia, so these poor women were forced to endure countless procedures (well, we are told that one of the was operated on at least 30 times) without pain relief. He would not try the procedure on white women, even when they asked him to, because he did not believe they could endure the pain. I had not realized that this occurred, but I should not have been surprised to learn that doctors used to use slaves as test subjects – they did all sorts of horrifying things to them. I felt guilty, and I am almost certain to have no slave-owners in my ancestry.
The main thing I gleaned from this section is that I am extremely glad that we have choices in childbirth today. Whether or not we choose pain relief, whether or not we schedule induction or C-sections, at least we have choices. So many of our sisters before us did not. So many women had to witness the deaths of their babies because a substandard “doctor” thought he could do better than the midwife, and many died themselves as well. Midwives didn’t have all the answers either, and there are techniques now that save babies and mothers that did not exist in previous generations. We are blessed and lucky, no question about that.
Other posts about Get Me Out:
Post 1: Get Me Out, by Randi Hutter Epstein, M.D.
Post 2: Sleeping Through Childbirth
Post 3: Trust Me, I’m a Doctor
Post 4: Do-It-Yourself Childbirth
Post 5: On Fertility
[...] seems to connect to past books in some way. One of the characters in this book is named after the doctor mentioned in Get Me Out, the one who operated on slave women (without anesthesia because he [...]
We videotaped my deliveries, but my instructions were to keep it discreet and at a distance–showing nothing except the baby once it came out. I wanted a memory of baby’s first moments of life. The funny thing is that the only times we really watched the videos again was when I was expecting the next baby. I usually just had my husband and mom in the room with me, plus the nurse and the doctor, and a few times–the NICU nurses (because of trauma to the babies due to meconium aspiration due to prolonged labor). It got kind of crazy in there at times. The one thing I remember the most, is that when it came down to it, my husband and mom were not much help–mere bystanders or witnesses to my pains and the babies’ births. When it came to the end, I just listened to the nurse and the doctor and to what my body was telling me. Nothing else mattered at that point. I remember having to focus on the baby so that the pain wouldn’t overtake me. It was amazing and wonderful and somewhat foreign to me all at the same time. I remember just praying to God to take over and help me finish, especially with my 4th. It was almost like someone took over for me because I was so exhausted that I didn’t feel like I could continue further. I still find that a little bit miraculous. I doubt I would have survived past my first delivery if I hadn’t been bearing children in modern times. Both the baby and I probably would have died because of complications.