Slippery Narratives

Sit with a group of new moms together and you will inevitably hear a story or two about birth. From the moment that a women reveals that she is pregnant she is surrounded by women telling their birth tales: in line, in the bathroom, in the park, over lunch; women participate in the ritual process of recounting birth experiences, forming those experiences out of the threads of memory and pieces of stories left after the ritual performance of birth itself. Pregnant women (and anyone around them who will listen) become members of a narrative ring; bound by a conspiracy of the body, contracted by maternity to hear, to tell and retell what others insidiously, joyously, even anxiously- tell and retell. In every act of childbearing two stories are simultaneously produced, a story of what the ‘body’ does and a story of what the ‘woman’ does; the ‘body’ might dilate slowly while the ‘woman’ screams out for pain medication. The body and the woman intersect and influence one another while still managing to maintain independent realities.

Human’s frame understanding of experience in terms of narrative account. When we try to understand why things happen, we put events in temporal order, making decisions about beginnings, middles and ends or causes and effects by virtue of imposing plots on otherwise chaotic events, creating what Rita Charon calls narrative knowledge. If narratives are stories that have a teller, a listener, a time course, a plot and a point, then narrative knowledge is what we naturally use to make sense of them. The narrating and sharing of birth stories play an important role in creating and recreating the performance of giving birth. A classic story of the marriage of childbirth and narrative, cited by Claude Levi-Strauss, is one of a woman who had difficulty giving birth. After a long night and eventually a stalled labor a shaman told the woman in labor the story of valiant warriors freeing a prisoner trapped by strangers, and on hearing the plot resolution, she gave birth to her child. After an imagined break-through, she had a physical break-through. Nature imitated narrative. In this instance narrative served as mental and emotional tool for the production of a woman in labor, and in the course of her giving birth, a new story was created. One that will be recounted time and time again, to her sisters, her friends, anthropologist’s and in a few years, the child herself.

Telling a narrative in any setting is a bridging performance. Most obviously it connects the teller and the listener. A pregnant woman becomes both the subject of and subject to birth stories. Depending on the community she is in, she could hear childbirth described as anything from a horrific and severely painful event to a cosmically orgasmic body quake – there is rarely any narrative in between. This discrepancy of experience, leads one to believe that what one hears about childbirth might influence and shape physical enactment of childbirth. When faced with the often frightening and confusing language of clinical medicine, it is the stories of other women’s experiences that serve as navigational guidance. Asked why she was opting for an elective Cesarean section, a woman recently said to me "my friend’s baby had a really big head and got stuck in her vagina. My Doctor says I have a small pelvis and I just don’t want to be stuck like my friend. She said it was the worst”. Whether a claim like this is ‘bio-medically’ true or not, it certainly is bioculturally interesting. This woman, backed by her doctor, is making a physical choice based on the medical fact of her small pelvis (small compared to what?) and the story of another woman’s birth experience. Another woman stated that she was scared to have babies because all of the women in her family have reported excruciating births. What gets passed on from generation to generation through the body is transmitted and constituted through oral narrative. Oral texts are slippery entities, the way that they are performed and made meaning of shift from person to person. Here I will explore how the sharing of birth stories shapes and reshapes the performance of childbirth within three women’s lives.

A woman walks into a birthing clinic to deliver her first baby. The midwives check her dilation, determine that she is only two centimeters dilated and send her home telling her to come back when her contractions are three minutes apart and lasting one full minute. The woman leaves, gets in a taxicab, and delivers her baby in the cab on the way home.

The dramatic story of a taxicab birth is not a new one; although nobody has formally written about it, this tale is one of the most commonly produced and reproduced birth stories (at least in places like NY where most people travel while in labor by taxi to the hospital or birthing center). I heard this story, and almost identical versions of it three times by three separate tellers in March of 2007. Each teller was pregnant with her first child. Presumably the events of this particular story happened in Brooklyn, NY but as is characteristic of folk and oral narratives its original source cannot be traced. Its interpretation is as diffuse as the tellers who make meaning of it.

The first teller is a forty five year old singer who is married to the drummer in her band. They are having their first child ‘late in life’ because they spent years on the road touring. They plan to deliver their child at home. In her version of the story the taxicab birth happened to her ‘friends cousin’. She told me the story in the context of a hospital versus home birth discussion that she and her husband had been having. Upon hearing this story she was swayed towards homebirth.

“I really see how very natural childbirth is. I mean, in a hospital they try to control everything, but like this woman her body just had its own thing going on. And the baby was fine. Like totally fine. In a taxicab. I mean she could have been squatting in the bush like most women do. I mean who cares if I am older, my body wouldn’t have let me get pregnant if it couldn’t have the baby. So anyway, it (the story) just made me less scared, and more like… no matter where you are babies come out and well if I am at home at least I won’t have anywhere I need to get except the bed.”

The second teller is a nineteen-year-old West Indian immigrant. She is having her baby without the support of her parents or the baby’s father. She plans to deliver at the hospital closest to her house. In her version of the tale, the woman giving birth was her ‘sister’s friend’. Upon hearing this story she felt fearful of her own circumstances and expressed desire for medical intervention and constant supervision.

“ I mean it’s totally crazy how fast it could happen. I just want them to like take it out of me. Not really, but I would hate for something like that to happen to me, to be all alone on my way to the hospital and have nobody to catch the baby, except you know, a dirty cab driver. So scary. So I just want them to umm, induce me when its time, like start the whole thing there that way I wont have to worry about being alone, the nurses will always be there."

The third teller is a corporate lawyer in her early thirties. Her husband is an entertainment lawyer. They plan to travel an hour to a hospital that has very high tech equipment and celebrity birthing suites. This woman did not admit to any personal connection to the woman who gave birth in a cab, but said she heard it from a coworker. In recounting this story to me, her intent was to confirm her decision to travel far to a hospital that was high tech and high intervention, which in her version intrinsically meant ‘better’.

“I wonder if there was a law suit against those midwives that sent that poor woman home. I mean clearly she knew that she needed care or else she wouldn’t have come in the first place, and those midwives that sent her away, well, it just makes me feel really good that we will be going to the hospital where all of the best doctors are and they understand that birth in this day and age is not something you treat lightly, we have the technology so why not use it! You know my sister had her baby at this hospital and she came in at 2cm and they just gave her a nice epidural, some pitocin to speed things up, and voila, she had a baby. That’s what I expect. To be treated like a human being. None of this animal stuff. “

The same story produces three radically different meanings and performative outcomes for each woman’s birth experience. It is not possible to view these oral narratives apart from issues of race, class, power and gender. In ‘Absent Gender, Silent Encounter’; Debora Kodish identifies one purpose of feminist scholarship as the deconstruction of ‘male paradigms’ and another as the reconstruction of models attentive to women’s experiences. Childbirth is certainly a woman’s experience, and yet is embedded in a medical narrative of the body that is historically male centered. As each woman wades through the creative, shifting, interstitial process of negotiating the meaning and value of birth, the taxi story dramatizes the convergence of multiple performativities on the birth experience. In telling the tale, she reclaims an identity for herself as a birthing woman within the context of an always constructed feminine performance. This identity is inextricable from the birth narratives that she has been told by others and chooses to align herself with. Each of these women is telling the taxicab story with the hopes of a better outcome for herself, and yet ‘what’ a better outcome is varies from woman to woman, community to community and ultimately story to story.

In many ways birth stories imply a radical inversion of established structures of meaning and action and so must be, it seems, counter-performed. Della Pollack writes about this counter performance of birth stories stating “They must be circumscribed, discredited, pushed to the margins of discursive practice, whether by identification with ‘gossip’ lore’ or anecdote, or to make a woman’s body and so her story conform to prescribed medical narratives”. This fundamental connection between tale and body has a narrative tracing to the Cartesian philosophical separation of mind and body inherent in the scientific medical view, which does not permit the interaction of individual consciousness with the molecules and atoms that comprise the ‘substance’ of scientific inquiry. Not surprisingly, the dominant metaphors describing birth in the late twentieth century are characterized by mechanical images in which a woman’s body is fragmented into working parts over which she has little control. As Emily Martin phrases it “medically, birth is seen as the control of laborers (women) and their machines (their uteruses) by managers (doctors) often using other machines to help,” The canonical obstetrics textbook Williams Obstetrics encapsulates the mechanicity of the dominant medical view; it defines birth as “the complete expulsion or extraction from the mother of a fetus”. Martin argues that “there is a compelling need for new key metaphors, core symbols of birth that capture what we do not want to loose about birth”. She argues that any attempt to conceive new languages for birth will be fraught with the contradictions arising from living within an andocentric society shaped by mechanical images of birth and bodies.

In the United States, pregnant women have two choices, to birth at a hospital with an obstetrician, or to birth at home with a midwife. Only one percent of the population chooses the latter . Choice is often rooted in privilege, and feeling free to choose where, how and with whom to birth is no different. Because western culture privileges medicalized, technological and interventionist birth over natural birth, it is ironically most often only the privileged who have access to ‘natural’ birthing options. Western women who choose to birth at home tend to have access to education that allows them to challenge the hegemony of the system, but to do so with the knowledge and confidence that hospitals and insurance companies are there for ‘backup’ should they need them; they therefore inhabit what theorist Donna Haraway calls post-biomedical bodies- bodies that do not entirely deny the usefulness of biomedicine, but are able to challenge its authority. Conversely, in areas of the world without large western influence, most new babies pass through the hands of midwives. In these areas, it is only the privileged who have access to ‘western’ style birth experiences in a hospital. These ironies provide ample room for questioning the intersections between cultural and medical practice as they are chosen, experienced, embodied and turned into tales.

A story like the taxicab tale, in its unpredictability, its high drama, and uncontrollable female body rupture, disrupts this ‘male tale’ of the body and perhaps is why women across race and class divisions feel so drawn to telling it. The middle-aged singer, who sees the ‘good’ in the tale, elaborates on the potential for a natural and un-interventionist homebirth; in doing so she disrupts the medical narrative that assumes the birthing body must be controlled. By invoking alternative systems of knowledge, this woman uses the story to challenge the hegemony of mainstream childbirth systems. The young woman, who reads into and interprets ‘fear’ as the dominant theme of the woman alone in a cab, aligns herself as a subject to medical practice and is comforted by the notion of her rupturing body under constant management. By virtue of her vulnerability as an ‘other’ this young, single, pregnant, woman of color trusts the institution of medicine to take care of her, exemplifying what Foucault called the clinical ‘gaze’. Finally the lawyer both expects and demands technology as an extension of her privilege. The body as machine is a removal from that which is primitive. For this woman, the ‘uncontrollable’ birth of the woman in the taxicab is a gross malpractice of a medical profession that should be better at monitoring and managing bodies.

One clear distinction is that none of these women wants the taxicab birth to happen to them, yet everybody wants to talk about it. The women told this story in the hopes of achieving for themselves and thus being licensed by what medical discourses describe as a ‘good outcome’, to elaborate and embellish dangers and conflict, with the intent of improving the climax, of ensuring relief in the final orderliness of all things. What Della Pollack calls the ‘almost but’ structure of birth stories, the expression of happiness depends on a ‘flirting’ with death: exposing the possibility of death only to deny it. Depending on her cultural circumstances, each woman sees a different path to denying it, yet is equally intrigued by the dramatic thread.

Perhaps unintentionally, the narrative ring of women telling these stories undermine the presumed neutrality of medical procedures and the apparent transparency of birth experiences with the pressure of their own reflexivity, effectively hot wiring a networked of rituals and resistances composed at least in part of medical techno-dramas, prenatal pedagogies, compulsive performance of the ‘good mother’, and the birth narratives that in various forms pervade, mock and sustain all of the above. Looping through multiple performativities, birth stories threaten not only the conventional isolation of birth from other episodes in the formation of cultural identity but also the concomitant isolation of birth from the broader body-politics, related issues that become silenced narratives such as miscarriage, abortion or even sexual orientation.

When women tell stories of the birthing body, the body becomes story; birth stories are always already performed. As performances they are unique constructions of bodies in time. As minor myths of origin, they loan history the authority of beginnings, through repetition and condensation, they become the founding facts of history. The convergences of performativity and maternity, in making history subject to the maternal body performing itself in ritual, spectacle and story.