This is a fragment of the second part of chapter 3 of the book ‘Madres mamÃferas’ recently published by the journalist Eva Millet, a regular contributor to ‘La Vanguardia’ on Plataforma Editorial. The chapter is entitled ‘Natural childbirth: spiritual mission’ and the text chosen for the readers of ‘Vivo’ talks about the origin of the movement that defends this way of giving birth.
“Natural childbirth -without anesthesia, and if possible at home- is another of the pillars of natural parenting. The natural and empowered mother will give birth without painkillers, far from hospital intervention. A feat that, on occasions, she will share on social networks (“It was an animal birth, 36 hours long”; “We are mammals, we are born in privacy!”; “A deep, primitive pain”; “Giving birth at home is spiritual »; «I found my wildest, most primitive and pure side»), thus urging others to adhere to this experience that each time has more followers in developed countries.
In recent decades, the so-called “natural birth” has become another way of showing that you are a different mother. For some it is also considered a way of doing politics: of becoming a disobedient mother who goes against the system and exercises her “right to decide” how to give birth. A part of current feminism claims this experience as part of a fight against the so-called obstetric violence exercised by the medical patriarchy.
An interesting aspect of this claim is that the origins of the natural childbirth movement are not, precisely, linked to the feminist struggle. In fact, it was a number of men in the 20th century, when the Old Testament “thou shalt bring forth in pain” curse already seemed to be overcoming, told women that they had to keep doing it that way. The curious thing is that it was the women themselves who, in the name of another ideology, naturalism, have picked up the baton with such enthusiasm.
Dr. Grantly Dick-Read, whose remarks open this chapter, is considered the father of the natural childbirth movement. Like William Sears, he was a man of deep religious convictions: a fervent evangelical, a branch of Protestant Christianity that bases religious authority on the Bible and its preaching. In fact, Dick-Read said on several occasions that he had a mission: to give modern women the experience of natural childbirth. An experience that he, he was convinced, was going to change society.
Dick-Read was born in England in 1890. Although there are contradictions in his biography regarding where he came into the world (they oscillate between Norfolk and Suffolk), they do agree that he was an attractive and charismatic man, with the gift of speech. There is also unanimity that his father was a farmer and that, as a child, his last name did not have a hyphen, something that he would incorporate later, to have more status.
Faith was very important to young Grantly, who considered becoming a pastor. However, he chose to study medicine at Cambridge, where he soon became interested in obstetrics and the physiology of pain. During his time as a resident in London, he attended several deliveries in the poorest areas of the capital, a Dickensian environment, miserable and precarious.
Despite this, Dick-Read saw the light when, in a humble house in the Whitechapel neighborhood, he witnessed a birth that seemed exemplary to him: the woman in labor, lying on a cot, did not make a sound. Without drama, without complaints, in an atmosphere of “quiet kindness”, he gave birth, refusing the chloroform that the doctor offered him. «He has not hurt. It didn’t have to hurt, right, doctor?” She told him, calmly, after giving birth to the creature.
With this story, which Dick-Read would repeat in his talks and books, the story of the painless natural childbirth movement began to be built.
And it is that Dick-Read was convinced that, by “natural law”, women were prepared not to suffer in childbirth. That the pain was the product of fear and tension, instilled by modern society. And the more progress, he assured him, the more pain. A follower of eugenics, he was concerned about the decline of the white, educated population of his still-imperial England. He argued that the demographic decline among “civilized” Britons (for him, middle- and upper-class women) was the result of their unreasonable fears of suffering during childbirth.
From this premise, Dick-Read built his theory, which sought to return the moment of birth to its original state. He was against the scientific advances in his discipline -notably anesthesia- which, however, the English women began to demand in those first decades of the 20th century. The women had discovered that what their mothers and grandmothers had told them: that they had to put up with suffering when giving birth, could be mitigated thanks to science. And that’s how they wanted it for themselves.
However, Dick-Read was not the only one interested in childbirth without analgesia in his time. This issue was being experienced in the then Soviet Union, in whose maternity hospitals mothers were trained to give birth with the power of their mind and their breathing as the only relief.
The technique —known as the psychoprophylactic method— was inspired by the theory of classical (or Pavlovlian) conditioning, of the scientist Iván Pávlov, national pride and Nobel Prize in Medicine. The logic of the Soviets was that, if Pavlov’s dogs could associate the sound of a bell with food, Russian women could associate the practice of breathing exercises with the absence of pain.
Unlike Dick-Read, convinced that natural childbirth was the beginning of a style of spiritual motherhood, in the Soviet Union the promotion of that technique was done for more prosaic reasons: there were no means to supply painkillers. The shortage of medicines, however, was not mentioned in Soviet propaganda, which gleefully claimed that this Pavlovian training had made 90% of women give birth without pain.
This news intrigued a French obstetrician named Fernand Lamaze, who practiced at a labor union hospital in Paris. Lamaze had ties to communism, which allowed him to travel to the Soviet Union and document the psychoprophylactic method firsthand. He was so impressed with it that he decided to implement it at his Parisian hospital, detailing it in his own book, which he presented in 1956. Lamaze attributed the practice of “painless childbirth” to Russian doctors and psychologists and called Dick-Read’s theories unscientific. and mystical. That provoked the indignation of the English, who claimed sole responsibility for the idea and counterattacked through the press. Back then, he had the means to do it. He was president of the first Natural Childbirth Association in his country (now the highly influential National Chilbirth Trust) and had recorded a BBC program on this subject.
The controversy between the two methods (which were known as the “Russian” and the “English”) reached high places. Pius XII himself took action on the matter, who spoke through a papal speech on the moral and religious issues of the matter. The Catholic Church could not fail to give its opinion on a technique “in which no artificial means is used, but only the natural forces of the mother are brought into play”.
To begin with, his holiness contradicted the thesis that pain is the fruit of the imagination. Historical sources, both profane and religious, ratified the proverbial pains of women in childbirth: «Painless childbirth, considered as a common occurrence, is in clear contrast with the common human experience, that of today and also that of the past. and from the most remote times».
The Holy See, however, did not dare to give a scientific assessment of either of the two methods, whose conclusions it described as “hypothesis.” He had no problem, on the other hand, in issuing an assessment on ethical issues, not finding “nothing reprehensible” from the moral point of view. The Pope also pointed out that, although pain could have a spiritual value, the Catholic Church did not censure the provision of appropriate analgesics to relieve it. Put to decide, however, they opted for the English method against that of the communist country, since the one from the Soviet Union was based on “a materialistic conception”, that is, not spiritual.