Volume 22, Number 15 · October 2, 1975
The Theft of Childbirth
By Adrienne Rich
Immaculate Deception: A New Look at Women and Childbirth in America
by Suzanne Arms
San Francisco Book Company/Houghton Mifflin, 318 pp., $6.95 (paper)
Birth Without Violence
by Frederick Leboyer
Knopf, 114 pp., $7.95
Childbirth has nowhere been regarded merely as one possible event in a woman's life. The Hebrews saw in women's travail the working of 'Eve's curse' for tempting Adam to the Fall. The Romans called it poena magna—the great pain. But poena also means punishment, penalty. Whether as a 'peak event' or as a torture rack, childbirth has been a charged, discrete happening, mysterious, polluted, often magical; in our current idolatry, a triumph of technology. Thirty years ago, in Male and Female, Margaret Mead noted the violence done by American hospital obstetrics to both infant and mother in the first hours of life.[1] Within the last few years, partly within and partly outside the women's movement, criticism of technologized childbirth has been growing, notably in California, where an important case is under appeal by a group of midwives in Santa Cruz who are charged with practicing medicine without a license.
Review, 6125 words
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