Excerpt from ‘Get Me Out’: A History of Childbirth

February 2nd, 2010

Eve, the first woman to become pregnant, suffered from excruciating pain during the delivery because she cheated on her diet. God told her to not eat an apple, but she was tempted by the serpent’s claim that the forbidden fruit would endow her and Adam with worldly knowledge. In God’s fury, he transformed the serpent into a belly-crawling creature. Then he turned to Eve and said, “I greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children.”

The thought pattern was set. Women deserved pain. In 1591, Eufame Maclayne was burned at the stake for asking for pain relief during the birth of her twins. Attitudes did not change much when safer anesthetics were discovered in the middle of the nineteenth century. Most people thought they were fine for surgery but not childbirth. Devout men and women believed that the pain in childbirth was a heavenly duty. If you couldn’t endure the agony of childbirth, how would you handle the ups and downs of motherhood? (Why no equivalent hazing process for fathers? Vasectomies without pain meds?) Pain relief became somewhat acceptable when Queen Victoria asked Dr. John Snow for a whiff of chloroform to ease her delivery during the birth of Prince Leopold on April 7, 1853. But only somewhat.

Birth from antiquity through the Middle Ages was an all-girls affair orchestrated by men who had never seen a baby born. It was considered obscene for a man to enter the delivery room, yet they wrote the guidebooks, doling out advice based on hunches handed down over generations. (In 1522, Dr. Wert, a German doctor, was sentenced to death when he was caught dressing like a woman and sneaking into a delivery room.) Their words of wisdom (or of ignorance) were a man-made concoction of myth, herbs, astrology, and superstition. Nearly everything was about good sex and good thoughts and eating and drinking the right things. It was not simple. As far back as 1500 BC, probably even earlier, women had access to all sorts of explicit information about sex, pregnancy tests, abortions, and contraceptives.

If you were lucky to be in a city, you may have been helped by a licensed midwife (European cities started educating and registering midwives around the fifteenth century); if you were in the rural outback, you may have had an uneducated but experienced midwife or a female family friend. In any event, you were surrounded by a gaggle of women. Oddly enough, expectant women were not supposed to be catered to, but to cater. You were expected to act as hostess and serve the aptly coined “groaning beer” and “groaning cakes.” Friends of the laboring woman were called “gossips,” as in God sibs, as in siblings of God. You can assume they did what all women would do under the circumstances — sit around and talk about other people. So what was once an epithet for “close-to- God” morphed into a term for “behind-the-back chatter.”

Women were told how to speed labor (a concoction of herbs), what to eat (nothing too spicy), what to drink (not too much wine), and what to think (no angry thoughts). Women were told how long to breast-feed and when to hand the baby to a wet nurse. They were told to have enough sex because a splash of sperm moistens the womb. They were also told not to have too much sex because it wears out the baby-making machinery. That’s why “whores have so seldome children,” one guide said, because “satiety gluts that womb.” In France, pregnant women rarely left the house after dark because they were told that if they looked at the moon, the baby would become a lunatic or sleepwalker.

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