Yes ‘died in childbirth’ has been sanitised to such an extent that in culture like that of India, this is something inverted to celebrate feminine courage. The mother becomes a self-sacrificial figure and her principal duty is to wage a war against life itself in order to give birth.
I say this repeatedly whenever this topic arises, time and again. Politicising motherhood is not different from politicising sexuality - it is about patriarchal assertion on body of anyone other than a heteronormative man. And power to birth is quite a fundamental superpower, which will obviously be a highly controlled by the state, especially an authoritative one.
Thanks for such a thoughtful comment, Swarnali. I recently saw the play John Proctor is the Villain, which draws the distinction between narrative (in the play, the disembodied idea of a man’s ‘honor’ and legacy) vs. the reality of the a woman’s lived experience, the reality of her body. It seems to me that you’re alluding to something similar here: valuing the cultural ‘story’ of ‘death in childbirth’ as a kind of earned female heroism, over and above the experience of women’s bodily suffering - and death! It’s one thing to have done this however many centuries ago when death in childbirth seemed inevitable, but now? I can’t help but think that the tradwife narrative, combined with the rollback in reproductive rights, is inching us closer to this in the States as well.
Extremely articulate way to bring this into the colloquial narrative Leah. Thank you for saying it in these many words. ‘earned female heroism’ this, fundamentally this is excavated through the stories of endings that traditional women met through millennia. You brilliantly deconstructed ‘died in childbirth’ as a pathology rather than a internalised cliché.
The bottomline is childbirth is a healthcare situation and most countries in the world except the global North is not efficient or resourceful enough to provide it to all women of their nation. And with rollback of reproductive rights in America, the implications are going to come breaking down on the lesser privileged people who give birth throughout the world. This seems like a horrible addition to the already suffering plight of the woman in global south. Whatever America does, reverberates globally.
You are so right, Swarnali. These rollbacks impact people who give birth internationally, perhaps not right away, but eventually, always. Seeing the language of personhood now be applied to fetuses is all apart of this pathology -- it is SO scary to witness.
This is exactly why we need to state it in the plainest of language! You are so right — it is positioned as a duty all to benefit patriarchy and we do ourselves and future women such a disservice when we continue to dismiss the harm. Thank you for spending such thoughtful time with Leah’s words!! Love you!!!
I know right Kate! It infuriates me when women themselves demand this narrative from other women, women who have survived the dangers of childbirth. They conveniently forget to talk about it like it is not a healthcare situation but some fascinating lifestyle.
Thank you so much for hosting and introducing me to Leah. What a strong case she has built here against the international neutralisation of motherhood as default for every woman.
This is so powerful and important, thank you for featuring Leah’s essay. I hadn’t ever considered what the phrase “died in childbirth” glosses over and how it takes away from women.
Exactly! It is so easy for historians to use but never thought about what is missed when we use it. Thank you for spending time with Leah’s powerful words! 💜
For the past several years, my on-and-off bedtime reading has been going through the Wikipedia pages of historical figures. It's genuinely saddening to read how many women died of pregnancy and childbirth related causes and for me, infuriating even 500 years later to read about women who obviously should not have become pregnant again, who conceived another child and then died from it. And I am mostly reading about nobility and the well-off, it's tragic to imagine how often this must have occurred for women in the margins of history.
For me, a person who has rarely encountered pregnant people at all in my personal life, reading about these women's deaths and the seriousness of pregnancy has actually been quite jarring.
Yes it is so tragic. For some reason, this really hit home for me with Mary Wollstonecraft, especially. I had known that she was Mary Shelley’s mother, but I hadn’t put two-and-two together, until relatively recently, that she had died just days after Mary Shelley’s birth. It’s ironic, too, that Mary Wollstonecraft never really wanted to get married, not clear that she ever really desired children. Certainly she never wanted anything resembling a traditional family.
I agree: what was it like for women in the margins of history? Although I do think about the unique situation of noble girls (at least in Europe) in the Middle Ages and Renaissance because they were married so young for dynastic reasons, whereas middle class women and lower class women married later. Noble girls were sometimes married as young as ten (!). Often the families didn’t expect them to sleep with their husband for a few years but by 14-15, they were looking for a pregnancy. It’s really hard to wrap my mind around that.
Witnessing those women is so important. Sitting with the reality; the weight of it--thank you for doing so. I so appreciate you spending time with Leah's words and reflecting on them in such a way.
As Leah mentioned in her below (above? not sure where this comment will fall within the thread) note, the girls and young women of the nobility's reality was shaped by dynastic pronatalism, and they often were treated by university trained doctors that didn't treat them as humans, but incubators -- the women of the margins were often treated by midwives in place of the university doctors, and though we of course can't ever know that data around outcomes of those times, receiving care from a midwife often resulted in better outcomes, though of course, not always. Jarring is the exact right word for what it feels like to come up against these stories time and again. Thank you for spending your time here 💜
I just have to add this given your mention of midwives vs. doctors. If you remember from *Young Queens* Catherine de' Medici was very pro midwife. She had two midwives, in particular, whom she really trusted and wanted to send to Spain to help Elisabeth during childbirth. Elisabeth refused the midwives - partly because Philip II distrusted midwives but mostly because Elisabeth was trying to keep Catherine out of the birthing room for both personal and political reasons. So the question of midwives / doctors took on international, political implications too....
As someone who had two very difficult, life-threatening pregnancies, thank you for honoring the actual threat of growing a fetus. I wish for a world where all women truly had the choice to go through pregnancy or not. Even in it's non-complicated, "normal" experience, it is still a bit horrific. I wish for a world where we have autonomy. Thank you, again.
Thanks so much for reading, and for your comment. I am so sorry to hear about your difficult pregnancies - they are all too common, yet painful and traumatic to each and everyone who experiences them. I hope that time has brought you some healing.
Sarah, thank you for sitting with Leah's words--even in the face of your own pain and experiences! I am so grateful for you. I too had a traumatic pregnancy, and I see you. We all deserve better than this -- our foremothers deserved better. I hope as we continue to name this trauma, to identify it, we can begin to heal towards autonomy. Sending so, so much love to you!
Thank you so much for writing this- it's so needed. Anyone that has given birth must be able to see that it is one of the absolutely worst ways to go. Screaming, bleeding, worried about your baby, helpless, in pain...I mean it really is the stuff of horror. I say this as a horror writer.
It is glossed over far too much- I appreciated House of the Dragons depictions of childbirth which were brutal but felt real.
At the very least, if women die in childbirth- if I die in childbirth- please talk about it and be honest about it. Use the real words.
I have been in a healing dissolution process through Sanskrit chant for a few years and am experiencing a growing sense of grief for how much suffering in the world goes unwitnessed and how devastating the experience of shame is. I had a dream once where I was disembodied, floating in cold space and found myself witnessing a scene in a dimly lit bedroom. A woman giving birth and her midwife. The candlelight is flickering and I can barely hear their voices. The midwife is comforting the woman who seems to have lost her child and is bleeding out. She is begging the midwife not to inform her husband before she passes because she is ashamed of falling short as a mother. She doesn’t want to see him. A kind of animal hatred comes into me at invoking this memory (even if it’s a creative fiction of my dream space) which is difficult for me to find a landing place for. I regard it as a powerfully truthful image of how the heart’s natural motives for connection and belonging lay the groundwork for our experiences of vulnerability, and how our labels for one another have the power to make us turn away from those desires under incredibly bitter and painful circumstances. It is so cruel to have laid an abstract, cognitive standard of creative divinity onto the childbearing population. The gatekeepers of these awful ideas go about congratulating themselves as virtuous as they rationalise enslavement, re-creating a heavenly scene their own mothers probably gave them where they were the center of attention and master of their own word.
Incredibly insightful essay!
Yes ‘died in childbirth’ has been sanitised to such an extent that in culture like that of India, this is something inverted to celebrate feminine courage. The mother becomes a self-sacrificial figure and her principal duty is to wage a war against life itself in order to give birth.
I say this repeatedly whenever this topic arises, time and again. Politicising motherhood is not different from politicising sexuality - it is about patriarchal assertion on body of anyone other than a heteronormative man. And power to birth is quite a fundamental superpower, which will obviously be a highly controlled by the state, especially an authoritative one.
Thanks for such a thoughtful comment, Swarnali. I recently saw the play John Proctor is the Villain, which draws the distinction between narrative (in the play, the disembodied idea of a man’s ‘honor’ and legacy) vs. the reality of the a woman’s lived experience, the reality of her body. It seems to me that you’re alluding to something similar here: valuing the cultural ‘story’ of ‘death in childbirth’ as a kind of earned female heroism, over and above the experience of women’s bodily suffering - and death! It’s one thing to have done this however many centuries ago when death in childbirth seemed inevitable, but now? I can’t help but think that the tradwife narrative, combined with the rollback in reproductive rights, is inching us closer to this in the States as well.
Extremely articulate way to bring this into the colloquial narrative Leah. Thank you for saying it in these many words. ‘earned female heroism’ this, fundamentally this is excavated through the stories of endings that traditional women met through millennia. You brilliantly deconstructed ‘died in childbirth’ as a pathology rather than a internalised cliché.
The bottomline is childbirth is a healthcare situation and most countries in the world except the global North is not efficient or resourceful enough to provide it to all women of their nation. And with rollback of reproductive rights in America, the implications are going to come breaking down on the lesser privileged people who give birth throughout the world. This seems like a horrible addition to the already suffering plight of the woman in global south. Whatever America does, reverberates globally.
You are so right, Swarnali. These rollbacks impact people who give birth internationally, perhaps not right away, but eventually, always. Seeing the language of personhood now be applied to fetuses is all apart of this pathology -- it is SO scary to witness.
Absolutely Kate! The regression is on its way. We are hurtling fast towards it if we don’t pivot with such stories and the courage to speak them.
This is exactly why we need to state it in the plainest of language! You are so right — it is positioned as a duty all to benefit patriarchy and we do ourselves and future women such a disservice when we continue to dismiss the harm. Thank you for spending such thoughtful time with Leah’s words!! Love you!!!
I know right Kate! It infuriates me when women themselves demand this narrative from other women, women who have survived the dangers of childbirth. They conveniently forget to talk about it like it is not a healthcare situation but some fascinating lifestyle.
Thank you so much for hosting and introducing me to Leah. What a strong case she has built here against the international neutralisation of motherhood as default for every woman.
Love you sister 💜
This is so powerful and important, thank you for featuring Leah’s essay. I hadn’t ever considered what the phrase “died in childbirth” glosses over and how it takes away from women.
Thanks so much for the comment, and I like how you describe it as a gloss. A way of acknowledging yet erasing at the same time.
Exactly! It is so easy for historians to use but never thought about what is missed when we use it. Thank you for spending time with Leah’s powerful words! 💜
For the past several years, my on-and-off bedtime reading has been going through the Wikipedia pages of historical figures. It's genuinely saddening to read how many women died of pregnancy and childbirth related causes and for me, infuriating even 500 years later to read about women who obviously should not have become pregnant again, who conceived another child and then died from it. And I am mostly reading about nobility and the well-off, it's tragic to imagine how often this must have occurred for women in the margins of history.
For me, a person who has rarely encountered pregnant people at all in my personal life, reading about these women's deaths and the seriousness of pregnancy has actually been quite jarring.
Yes it is so tragic. For some reason, this really hit home for me with Mary Wollstonecraft, especially. I had known that she was Mary Shelley’s mother, but I hadn’t put two-and-two together, until relatively recently, that she had died just days after Mary Shelley’s birth. It’s ironic, too, that Mary Wollstonecraft never really wanted to get married, not clear that she ever really desired children. Certainly she never wanted anything resembling a traditional family.
I agree: what was it like for women in the margins of history? Although I do think about the unique situation of noble girls (at least in Europe) in the Middle Ages and Renaissance because they were married so young for dynastic reasons, whereas middle class women and lower class women married later. Noble girls were sometimes married as young as ten (!). Often the families didn’t expect them to sleep with their husband for a few years but by 14-15, they were looking for a pregnancy. It’s really hard to wrap my mind around that.
Witnessing those women is so important. Sitting with the reality; the weight of it--thank you for doing so. I so appreciate you spending time with Leah's words and reflecting on them in such a way.
As Leah mentioned in her below (above? not sure where this comment will fall within the thread) note, the girls and young women of the nobility's reality was shaped by dynastic pronatalism, and they often were treated by university trained doctors that didn't treat them as humans, but incubators -- the women of the margins were often treated by midwives in place of the university doctors, and though we of course can't ever know that data around outcomes of those times, receiving care from a midwife often resulted in better outcomes, though of course, not always. Jarring is the exact right word for what it feels like to come up against these stories time and again. Thank you for spending your time here 💜
I just have to add this given your mention of midwives vs. doctors. If you remember from *Young Queens* Catherine de' Medici was very pro midwife. She had two midwives, in particular, whom she really trusted and wanted to send to Spain to help Elisabeth during childbirth. Elisabeth refused the midwives - partly because Philip II distrusted midwives but mostly because Elisabeth was trying to keep Catherine out of the birthing room for both personal and political reasons. So the question of midwives / doctors took on international, political implications too....
This is such an important add-on! Thank you, Leah.
As someone who had two very difficult, life-threatening pregnancies, thank you for honoring the actual threat of growing a fetus. I wish for a world where all women truly had the choice to go through pregnancy or not. Even in it's non-complicated, "normal" experience, it is still a bit horrific. I wish for a world where we have autonomy. Thank you, again.
Thanks so much for reading, and for your comment. I am so sorry to hear about your difficult pregnancies - they are all too common, yet painful and traumatic to each and everyone who experiences them. I hope that time has brought you some healing.
Sarah, thank you for sitting with Leah's words--even in the face of your own pain and experiences! I am so grateful for you. I too had a traumatic pregnancy, and I see you. We all deserve better than this -- our foremothers deserved better. I hope as we continue to name this trauma, to identify it, we can begin to heal towards autonomy. Sending so, so much love to you!
Thank you so much for writing this- it's so needed. Anyone that has given birth must be able to see that it is one of the absolutely worst ways to go. Screaming, bleeding, worried about your baby, helpless, in pain...I mean it really is the stuff of horror. I say this as a horror writer.
It is glossed over far too much- I appreciated House of the Dragons depictions of childbirth which were brutal but felt real.
At the very least, if women die in childbirth- if I die in childbirth- please talk about it and be honest about it. Use the real words.
Excellent essay!
“Use the real words.” Yes, yes, yes!👏🏻
Thank you for such a thoughtful comment and for spending time with the essay!
Excellent article, Leah, thank you!
Thank you for reading!
Thank you for spending time with Leah’s words! 💜
I have been in a healing dissolution process through Sanskrit chant for a few years and am experiencing a growing sense of grief for how much suffering in the world goes unwitnessed and how devastating the experience of shame is. I had a dream once where I was disembodied, floating in cold space and found myself witnessing a scene in a dimly lit bedroom. A woman giving birth and her midwife. The candlelight is flickering and I can barely hear their voices. The midwife is comforting the woman who seems to have lost her child and is bleeding out. She is begging the midwife not to inform her husband before she passes because she is ashamed of falling short as a mother. She doesn’t want to see him. A kind of animal hatred comes into me at invoking this memory (even if it’s a creative fiction of my dream space) which is difficult for me to find a landing place for. I regard it as a powerfully truthful image of how the heart’s natural motives for connection and belonging lay the groundwork for our experiences of vulnerability, and how our labels for one another have the power to make us turn away from those desires under incredibly bitter and painful circumstances. It is so cruel to have laid an abstract, cognitive standard of creative divinity onto the childbearing population. The gatekeepers of these awful ideas go about congratulating themselves as virtuous as they rationalise enslavement, re-creating a heavenly scene their own mothers probably gave them where they were the center of attention and master of their own word.