The Politics of Birthing Bodies

By Anna Ziggy Melamed, Midwife and Activist. This article is adapted from Ziggy’s talk at the Feminism for Birth and Maternal Health and Motherhood session at #FiLiA2021

The control over pregnancy and birth has always been a battleground.

Birth is a mammal reproduction strategy; a social and sexual event; the reproduction of labour power and the gender and class divides in patriarchal capitalism; a medical event with risks to be controlled (for some).

In the childbearing year, women confront patriarchy in new ways. Her relationships change, her body becoming public property to be discussed, touched and monitored and she experiences becoming marginalised and instrumentalised.

Birth itself is a physiological event that undoubtedly works best with minimal interference, much as sex does. Privacy, darkness and minimal language allows for a complex interplay of hormones, enabling the woman and baby to move through the rhythms of labour and birth.

Reproduction is not perfect and undoubtedly much of modern obstetrics saves lives. But how well is the medical industrial complex suited to physiological birth? Like any big institution it has its own motor and needs, and has developed a factory-line of maternity care. The woman’s body and it’s passenger get processed through a series of 20 minute antenatal appointments, maternity triage, Labour Ward, Maternity ward, then home. ‘Overdue’ labours and induced and ‘slow’ labours are artificially accelerated, despite the consequent increased intervention, with knock-on health risks for the mother and baby. The woman’s power and knowledge of her body recedes, and the risk narrative ensures she becomes compliant. The power of the white coat and hospital setting is alive and well. All this is a far cry from the empowered birthing woman at the peak of her powers.

Female body in patriarchal capitalism

Social reproduction is devalued in patriarchal capitalism, including the work of the childbearing year. This cheapens the cost of social reproduction and limits how and where the work can be done. There is a brutal history of state control over reproductive choice, ranging from prohibition on contraception and abortions to enforced sterilisation in export processing zones. Neoliberal ‘choice’ means little when wages are low, rents high and work insecure; or mothering a black boy-child in the US with the trigger-happy police force; or to the mother in a community that threatens ex-communication if she does not submit her daughter to FGM.

The active disempowerment around childbirth can be seen as a continuum; of the sexualisation of the female body, of abuse and rape, of low- or un-paid work. The body is reduced to its function; the vessel or incubator. Birth Workers are caught in a bind of wanting to be with-woman, but working within an institution that allows little space for the true craft of midwifery.

This session from the #FiLiA2021 explores how the patriarchy operates in birth, maternity and motherhood, specifically considering the choices available to women and how these are constrained as a means of control, at worst leading to obstetric violence.

The social aspect of birth has two faces: 1) It takes a village to raise a child and 2) in how we birth and raise our children, the social roles and social divisions are being reproduced in both the woman and the baby. A working-class black woman facing racism in labour senses the continuum from how she is treated in the workplace or on the street. A woman who wants to breastfeed, but whose baby is given a bottle of the reprocessed cow’s milk for Nestlé’s profit (Baby Milk Action, 2017), is being re-taught that her body is not enough. That she must be dependant on the capitalist market to raise her child.

However, at its best, birth can be empowering and can help women heal from past trauma and abuse and own their bodily power. Seeing their female sexuality as a positive and powerful force and loving its functionality. A woman supported to move through her own birth rhythms by her sisters learns that she is strong and held within a strong community. She learns that her body can surpass all she thought possible and bring forth a baby and nurture it from her own breasts. As she is cared for by her community, so she is enabled to care for her infant. All the women present can realise how powerful we are. If we remember how to breathe and how to push, we can birth not only our babies, but movements and revolutions!

Anna Ziggy Melamed is a practising midwife and life-long political activist. A veteran of the anti-capitalist movement, she has focused on workers' rights and the right to universal healthcare. She has written on the subject of the Witch Trials and the politics of social reproduction.