The (comparatively tiny) but growing percentage of expectant mothers opting for “natural” birth methods and home care has alarmed one French feminist (Elisabeth Badinter), whose newest book, The Mommy Trap, functions as a sort of anti-Luddite treatise, according to Heather Havrilesky’s review at Bookforum:
Badinter singles out the rise of naturalism as a key force returning women to the home. “Imperceptibly, nature had gained the stature of a moral authority universally admired for its simplicity and wisdom.” As they placed industrialization and the conveniences and shortcuts of technology in the firing line, women began embracing natural childbirth and home birthing, with the pain and suffering of parturition suddenly representing a transformative rite of passage. [...]
Badinter seems to prefer alarmist rhetoric to broader observations on current culture—even as she delivers sharp insights about the regressive turn of modern attitudes about motherhood. In addressing the oppressive nature of today’s pro-breast-feeding movement, for example, Badinter fills nearly four full pages with quotes from the La Leche League, an advocacy group for breast-feeding that is close to a caricature of naturalist-mothering dogma. For most long-suffering mothers, La Leche comes across as the breast-feeding equivalent of a corps of fiery Baptist preachers: good for a burst of inspiration when you’re close to giving up, bad when you’re seeking any sort of balanced perspective on motherhood.
In case you hadn’t surmised, this is a pretty punchy review, as far as academic book reviews go:
Willfully reactionary rhetoric like this doesn’t pound home Badinter’s arguments so much as undercut them; it effectively sacrifices an otherwise carefully conceived set of observations in order to pose a sloppy question that only a confused reader could encounter as anything but an incendiary digression. [...]
…do we really require a privileged French academic to tell us all this? “The best allies of men’s dominance have been, quite unwittingly, innocent infants,” writes Elisabeth Badinter, in her favored tone of one part outrage to three parts outrageousness. We can almost picture the author, sipping red wine with other photogenic idealists, surrounded by cobblestones, flanked by slanty rooftops, untouched by the compromises of contemporary womanhood.
Read the whole thing here.
April 18th, 2012 | 3:50 pm
I do not see the homebirthers giving birth in a tub as doing it for the baby’s sake. They do it for themselves, under guise of “all natural”. Anyone can deliver babies, but doctors and nurses are the ones who know what to do when something, usually unexpected, goes wrong. Moms have some physiologic reserve when if they have post partum hemorrhaging, and can make it to the hospital. Babies have little reserve. A few babies will die and then the homebirth movement will dwindle back to just the Amish, many of whom do not report the death of a neonate.
April 18th, 2012 | 4:47 pm
TXW: “Natural birth” is not in any way, shape, or form a synonym for “home birth.”
The book sounds completely insane, but the review is pretty crazy as well. The author appears to know absolutely nothing about “natural” philosophy, and her depiction of La Leche League as some sort of woman-hating bunch of kooks is completely unhinged.
April 18th, 2012 | 6:05 pm
I do not see the homebirthers giving birth in a tub as doing it for the baby’s sake. They do it for themselves, under guise of “all natural”. Anyone can deliver babies, but doctors and nurses are the ones who know what to do when something, usually unexpected, goes wrong
And yet I suspect the real reason for this involves people losing faith in the medical community.
Yes, they have the ability to do all sorts of things, but will they?
I find it interesting that when “Monty Python’s Meaning Of Life” was in the theaters, I thought the hospital and organ donor sketches were both not particularly funny, just sort of dumb – since obviously medical professionals don’t do anything of the sort. But even though that was the first I’d heard of either issue, I have come to hear a lot since then of people who seriously do worry about these things – and, unfortunately, I’ve read a great many things that support the idea that maybe there is some genuine reason for concern.
Not that hospitals actually behave quite as outrageously as in the hospital sketch, but they do (increasingly?) have issues like choosing one procedure over another for reasons that have nothing to do with what’s actually best for either mother or baby – for instance, I read that although unnecessary c-sections have been skyrocketing, c-sections are actually not good to have if you don’t need them: they endanger future pregnancies as well as future deliveries, and they put you in an entirely different (far more expensive) category when it comes to buying health insurance.
April 19th, 2012 | 8:07 am
@Blake,
C-sections are major surgery, but are also believed an excellent defense against lawsuits if the baby isn’t “perfect”. All three — excessive C-sections, “perfect babies”, and “sue ‘em” attitudes — are distortions in our culture.
Are we all sure Badinter wasn’t writing tongue in cheek?
April 28th, 2012 | 1:13 pm
Am I the only one who thinks that Badinter’s age might make her a bit out of touch with this generation of parents? No one seems to be mentioning this fact or the fact that she has a huge stake in formula given her millionaire status with Nestle. I answer the question, “Who is Elisabeth Badinter” here:
http://www.themommypsychologist.com/2012/04/27/who-is-elisabeth-badinter/
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