Posted on 04/30/2003 7:55:01 AM PDT by dead
Childbirth is not the blight that many middle-class women would have you believe, says Miranda Devine.
Stand by for an overdose of "yuppie kvetching" as US pop feminist Naomi Wolf arrives in town next week to complain about the traumas of childbirth and motherhood. Most famous for her 1991 book The Beauty Myth (about how lipstick crushes women's self-worth, but don't we love it), the glamorous New Yorker is guest speaker at a "working motherhood" forum in Sydney on Thursday, along with the Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Pru Goward.
Wolf is 40, married to a New York Times editor, and mother of two children, a girl aged eight and a boy, 3. She has found a whole new arena for her insights into the female condition.
And it's enough to make any mother or prospective mother slit her wrists. Wolf's beef is that mothers are held in contempt by society and that pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood are terrible travails which can only be eased by society "showering women" with "affirmation" and, of course, taxpayers' money.
"We need to not act like motherhood is some natural thing you just do like a cow," Wolf told Andrew Denton on his excellent ABC TV show, Enough Rope, on Monday night before flying to Australia.
She says motherhood is a thankless job in which, "No one pays you, you're doing manual labour a lot of the time, you get very few social benefits, you're supposed to run on just pure, kind of, emotion without any kind of social support or status and you're supposed to do it all alone even though in traditional societies there were many, many hands helping you."
She went on at length in this pessimistic vein: "[There is a] kind of a conspiracy of silence ... about how it's so fabulous to take home this tiny, adorable being, but then there's the fact that 50 per cent of women in the industrialised world experience postpartum depression and there's the fact that it's very likely that your partner will have to go back to work two weeks after your baby is born, leaving you all alone with this tiny dependent being."
There is more of the same in her latest book, Misconceptions, Truth, Lies and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood, published two years ago but recently released in paperback. While no one would argue there aren't hardships in parenting, the difficulties Wolf describes - of labour, of the pain of a caesarean wound, of the exhaustion of waking up every two hours to feed a newborn - are temporary, after all. And what human endeavour worth doing is effort-free?
But rather than be pleased about her life, the fact that she has combined a high-profile career with motherhood and marriage to a successful man, she has made a new career from dwelling on the negatives.
Rather than acknowledging the burdens of motherhood are lighter than ever for women in the developed world, Wolf goes for self-indulgent mourning for prepartum bodies, pre-baby marriages, disrupted sex lives and what she says is a loss of respect and status for women after they become mothers.
Rather than being thankful she managed to give birth to healthy children, she complains about the medical profession, seemingly unaware that many women - childless, single, infertile - would long to be in her privileged position.
Pregnancy and childbirth are safer than ever in the developed world, with Australia ranked by the World Health Organisation among the three safest countries in terms of maternal and perinatal mortality.
Yet instead of celebrating this good news story and "showering with affirmation" the doctors and nurses who made it possible, Wolf complains about the "medicalisation" of birth, following in the footsteps of childless feminists such as Germaine Greer, who railed against "inhuman" caesareans at a 1999 homebirth conference in Byron Bay.
Wolf, whose first child was delivered by emergency caesarean, complained to Denton about "too high rates of caesarean sections [and] more and more interventions that are not good for mothers, everything from epidurals to episiotomies [which] are taking over natural birthing processes".
In her book she appears to have been preoccupied with medical intervention from the start of her pregnancy, walking out on an obstetrician she thought was too "high-tech" and opting for a more "caring" midwifery-centred practice. She goes into gruesome detail about her birth experiences, which went from a 24-hour labour to foetal distress and emergency caesarean.
Her biggest trauma seems to have been that she saw a reflection of the operation from which she was supposed to be shielded by a green drape. But instead of turning her head away from the sight of her blood, she fixes on it. "Their gloves are bathed up to the elbow ... with streaks of bright red. No one notices that I see what their hands are dipped in: my centre, an open cauldron of blood." How did she expect the doctors were going to cut her open to retrieve her distressed baby without blood? She shouldn't have looked.
The celebrated British pregnancy book author Sheila Kitzinger, a natural birth activist, claimed this year that Wolf's childbirth experience had given her post-traumatic stress disorder. Whether or not that's the case, other women's birth stories are endlessly fascinating. For any mother, there will be a resonance to Wolf's tales of woe. But there is no benefit to them in pathologising motherhood.
Wolf and the mothers she interviews to bolster her views seem simply to be afflicted by what American stress researchers last year called "yuppie kvetching" - over-pampered people in affluent countries whingeing about relatively trivial troubles.
Their energy and the middle-class welfare money they crave would be better spent protecting the increasing numbers of children from dysfunctional households who will otherwise be neglected or abused or killed. The "affirmation" they want for themselves should be showered instead on the teachers and child-care workers who toil thanklessly for little pay and minimal respect for the brats of the self-indulgent classes.
devinemiranda@hotmail.com
I would do it all over again in a heartbeat. Especially now, when they are grown up and becoming parents themselves, I thank G-D every day for my wonderful family.
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