A Passion for Birth

by Sheila Kitzinger

  A

  Passion

  for Birth

  A

  Passion

  for Birth

  My life: anthropology,

  family and feminism

  Sheila Kitzinger

  A Passion for Birth: My life: anthropology, family and feminism

  First published by Pinter & Martin Ltd 2015

  © 2015 Sheila Kitzinger

  Sheila Kitzinger has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN 978-1-78066-170-4

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  The publishers would like to acknowledge that this book is not in any way connected with Passion for Birth™ childbirth educator workshops. Passion for Birth™ is a registered trademark held by Teri Shilling in the US and used with permission.

  Index Helen Bilton

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade and otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form or binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The publishers are grateful to The Estate of the late Louise Bennett-Coverley for permission to reproduce her poem ‘Census’ on page 103 and Deborah Ross for permission to use her untitled poem on pages 85–86.

  Photographs courtesy of the Kitzinger family unless otherwise stated. Photograph of Birthrights Ralley courtesy of Anthea Sieveking; Launch of Freedom and Choice in Childbirth courtesy of Chris Lord. All efforts have been made to contact the copyright holders, and the publishers will gladly correct any omissions in future editons.

  Set in Minion

  Printed and bound in the UK by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall.

  This book has been printed on paper that is sourced and harvested from sustainable forests and is FSC accredited.

  Pinter & Martin Ltd

  6 Effra Parade

  London SW2 1PS

  pinterandmartin.com

  sheilakitzinger.com

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  AN UNCONVENTIONAL CHILDHOOD

  Chapter Two

  OXFORD

  Chapter Three

  HOW BIRTH WAS FOR ME

  Chapter Four

  JAMAICA

  Chapter Five

  OUR HOUSE

  Chapter Six

  LECTURES AND BOOK TOURS

  Chapter Seven

  EMOTIONS IN CHILDBIRTH

  Chapter Eight

  CHALLENGING THE SYSTEM

  Chapter Nine

  THE EIGHTIES: INSTITUTIONS OR INITIATIVES

  Chapter Ten

  AROUND THE WORLD

  Chapter Eleven

  THE GOOD BIRTH GUIDE – TEN YEARS ON

  Chapter Twelve

  LENTILS TO DUBROVNIK

  Chapter Thirteen

  LECTURES AND WORKSHOPS

  Chapter Fourteen

  BECOMING A GRANDMOTHER

  Chapter Fifteen

  WHEN THERE IS NO BIRTHPLACE

  Chapter Sixteen

  IN THIS CENTURY

  Chapter Seventeen

  MY OBITUARY

  Additional photographs

  My special thanks

  References

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  This is the story of my half century of activism and research with women in more than 30 countries, and producing 24 books that are translated into 23 languages. It is written at a brisk pace that flows from its subject matter – birth and women’s and babies’ rights. It is not an autobiography so much as lightning flashes that shine on the most significant experiences in my life – as I struggle alongside women around the world and in every culture for women’s empowerment.

  Writing about memories is not easy. People from the past invade my dreams and wake me, and I live jostled by a crowd of ghosts who at times seem more real than human beings around me now. There is a persistent clamour of voices demanding that I remember them and shifting pictures that reshape my recollection of individuals and events to form new patterns, a vivid kaleidoscope of colours, one flash photograph overtaking and eclipsing another. It is more vivid than anything on TV, or anything that I have reconstructed, usually without realising it, because it made a coherent story. But as for the effect that these incidents had on my development, feelings and thinking – how can I evaluate them honestly? What part do they play in my personality, commitment and enthusiasm? How did they rush together to create the energy that suffuses me, and drives me on the adventures in which I find myself – about babies, birth, women, social justice and challenging powerful institutions?

  Birth, cookery and flower arranging used to be next to each other on the shelf in libraries and bookshops. They were domestic subjects, to do with woman and home. Like knitting and embroidery, they were reserved for women busy indoors, while men ran the world. In the last 40 years the subject of birth has burst these confines and become a political issue, and one that affects us all. This came about because of the energetic action of women, and some exceptional men, in the UK and internationally who committed themselves to positive change in childbirth. I am one of those women. A theme of this book is my work to humanise birth and acknowledge it as a major life transition.

  The right to knowledge about our bodies and minds in childbirth and to decide what hospitals and professional caregivers do to us and our babies is a fundamental human freedom.

  In these pages I describe personal experiences that have shaped me, from childhood, and tell how from the 50s on enormous changes have taken place, how they came about and why. I have juggled motherhood, lecturing, campaigning and anthropological research, painting, cooking, writing, listening to women overwhelmed with problems, counselling – and being there for my family.

  My life has never been split between work on the one hand and personal experiences and relationships on the other. I don’t go off to an office – and have rarely done so in the past. I need not comply with a pattern dictated by an institution. Nor obey its rules. This means that I never know what any day will bring and my life must look very untidy. My autobiography can’t fit into neat boxes.

  With 600,000 births a year in the UK, women are eager for knowledge not only about what is done to them but as a real life experience.

  Language is never neutral. It reflects a view of the world. From the time that my first book The Experience of Childbirth was was published I have worked to create a language for women’s intense experiences. Birth isn’t just pain, which is a side-effect of the work of the uterus and the opening of the cervix, bony pelvis and soft tissues. Yet pain has eclipsed other aspects of birth to such an extent that women don’t realise that if they are not free to move around, can’t get themselves into upright positions, are not surrounded by loving people who treat them as women – not just skeletons and muscles – and if they are in an alien environment, they suffer more pain, feel they have no control over it, and believe that nothing they can do will change it. When that happens pain turns to suffering. Until I started writing women really had no language for the sensations of giving birth. Now we have moved on from medical language to one that is women’s own.

  I describe people who had most impact on me, some of them international celebrities, others less well known, how I have combined research and activism with motherhood, and explore links between my mother’s radical beliefs, her pacifism and feminism and those of my daughter
s, three of whom are lesbians. And I show when and how I became fascinated by birth, how this has influenced my personal life, and the impact of anthropological research.

  I describe the powerful influence of my mother, pioneer feminist, pacifist and worker for racial equality.

  A chunk of the book is about my first field research in Jamaica and the effects of being immersed in another culture, seeing into the lives of women in a peasant society, and exploring birth, midwifery, sex, families and religion in the hills and in the shanty town down by Kingston harbour.

  Everybody’s memory is selective, and depending on what is happening in the present, our emotions at the time, and the people to whom we talk, it throws up different stories. I am often astonished when reminded of individuals I have encountered and incidents that have occurred. ‘I’d forgotten that!’ I can’t pretend to create a complete account of my life and give the whole unvarnished ‘truth’. But this is how it looks for me here and now.

  The American way of birth, dominated by obstetricians who expect women to behave like obedient children, started to colonise the rest of the world in the 60s. Pregnancy became treated as a pathological condition terminated by delivery in an environment of intensive care. As a result today childbirth is a medical crisis. Obstetricians actively manage labour with the sophisticated technology of ultrasound, continuous electronic monitoring and an oxytocin drip – perhaps with an elective Caesarean section so that the product of pregnancy, like any product leaving a factory, is in optimal condition.

  I believe that for all but a tiny minority of women birth need not and should not be like this, and that to turn the process of bringing new life into the world into one in which the woman is a passive patient being delivered rather than an active birth-giver not only degrades her, but also impedes hormonal co-ordination and physiological function. It actually makes childbirth more dangerous.

  I tell what I learned from my acting training, social anthropology at Oxford, and the international research that has enriched my life. For many women birth is like rape. Inspired by my daughter’s work with Rape Crisis, I came to support women suffering from post-traumatic stress after birth. This gave rise to the Birth Crisis Network and my work with women prisoners.

  The culture of childbirth is important for all of us because it is an expression of the significance of the coming to birth not only of a new individual but a family, and the quality of relationships between human beings.

  A baby becomes a person by being loved and cared for. We have created a style of childbirth in which it is an interruption of normal life rather than an integral part of its flow. It has been taken outside the home and away from the family so that for a couple having a baby it comes as a great surprise that birth has anything to do with loving and that giving birth can be an intense and joyful psycho-sexual experience.

  Traditionally around the world when a woman is transformed into a mother she gains added status, and other women, neighbours and family members, share the rituals and give comfort. This helps her over the bridge into motherhood and through the psychologically and socially difficult period in which she is ‘becoming’, and the demanding relationship with even the most adorable baby. In the 60s, 70s and 80s this kind of emotional support was more or less ignored. I heard doctors talk about concern for emotions in childbearing as ‘the icing on the cake’. We are only now beginning to discover the long term destructive effects on human beings and families of treating women as if they were containers to be opened and relieved of their contents.

  There is a good deal of discussion today about ‘bonding’ – providing an opportunity in the moments after birth for the mother to get to know her baby and feel it is hers. But it is not a magic chemical which can be superimposed in an alien and uncaring environment. Everything that happens after birth is the outcome of preceding events. Bonding is supported or made virtually impossible by the atmosphere in the birth room, the interaction between those in it, and the care given to the mother as a person, not just a body on a table.

  Every culture shapes the major transitions in life and there are similarities between patterns of birth and dying. When my daughter Polly had her terrible car accident in March 2009 and was rushed to hospital to be salvaged brain-damaged and with no choice about whether or not this happened, it led to my daughters Jenny and Celia’s study into how we can make informed decisions and – most importantly – informed refusals, not only when we are conscious and aware, but if we are unable to communicate at the time. Hence the campaign to promote advance decision-making, so that each of us can state how we wish to be treated.

  I write about challenging the power of big, bureaucratic and often mismanaged institutions, and how to address the needs of all child-bearing women – including prisoners, asylum seekers and those who suffer post-traumatic stress after birth – sometimes only revealed many years later. I show how passionate commitment, energy, and working with other women, can create social change, and explain why that matters, the cost and benefit, and how it affects me every day.

  I also talk about the set-backs and failures, sexual exploitation and abuse that I have encountered in the challenge for women’s rights in childbirth, that have in my mid-eighties impelled me in a race against time. My five daughters have made a major contribution and I have worked closely with them. I share many ideals with my husband Uwe and daughters. They are an exciting family.

  Though it may seem trivial to talk about my children and family adventures and crises, they are all part of the mixture. Mothers can’t be single-minded. Men might be able to achieve this. Not women with children. My life is chock full of writing, lecturing and counselling, but simultaneously I run a home, am a very involved mother with five daughters and three grandchildren, and cook, paint, and since it is an ‘open house’, entertain at the drop of a hat. Of course sometimes I feel guilty that I have not given the children my undivided attention. When they were little I used to leave a hot meal for them in the bottom of the Aga if I was busy or had to be out when they came in from school. I thought that was pretty good going. But Polly, at age six, came into the kitchen one day and said, ‘Sheila, why can’t you be a proper mother?’ She meant one waiting at the school gates.

  Because I do a lot of overseas lecturing I have wide experience of airports. Some people get a kick out of air travel. I hate it. It is always stressful and has demanded resilience, resourcefulness and good humour. I have been welcomed at airports by a full-scale rally of women with posters – occasionally even a choir singing jubilantly about home birth and midwifery. Sometimes I have roamed an airport, disoriented and suffering from jet lag, trying to find the person assigned to meet me, and even phoning offices of organisations to get information. Once I was not met at all, and felt I had stepped into a void, only to discover that the woman who should have picked me up had been murdered. That was Chicago in 1994.

  Road transport has ranged from a limousine with a fully stocked cocktail bar to a car stuffed with kids, a trike and everything but the kitchen sink, and a harassed mother trying to fit in hospitality between supermarket shopping and school runs who was not quite sure of the way to the hotel where I was to be deposited. Or I have had to kick my heels while we waited for another plane to land carrying two other speakers, so that the three of us could be stuffed in together. That plane was all too often delayed, or everyone got lost.

  I love my work. I dread the thought of sitting around on a beach roasting in the sun with nothing to do – unless there are fascinating people to watch and I have writing materials, a dictating machine or a book I am enjoying. I take enormous pleasure in exploring, learning and trying to understand human behaviour.

  I also love making things – constructing pictures, shapes, patterns, producing vivid colours – changing the environment so that it makes you stop and think, presents an unusual view of objects, startles, or even shocks. The book has illustrations of some of my paintings. I have included an idea of the variety and richness that gives me ze
st. I would find it difficult to keep going as I do in dismal surroundings.

  Neutrals and discreet shades are not for me – only as background to vivid colour. I stare disbelievingly at the make-overs on TV in which houses are turned pebble grey, beige and ash with the odd cushion to give colour accents. I like a home that is exuberant and welcoming, and that celebrates life.

  Our house is a small Cotswold manor house that was modernised in 1492, when fireplaces and ceilings were put in. I like to create an orchestra of colour, strong shapes, with light glowing and sparkling, the soft shimmer of candles at night, and visual surprises. With its great black oak beams, some recycled in medieval times from ancient galleys, with holes for the oars still visible, lofty ceilings, white walls, and carvings in stone and wood, Standlake Manor is a perfect stage for vivid and striking patterns. The kitchen glows with Portuguese pottery, china intricately covered with flowers, fruit and birds, and gleaming copper pans that were once my mother’s. There are tiles I have painted with birds and oranges and lemons around the sink and overhead. The table is covered with mosaics made of broken china that my daughters and I have made together, and everywhere peacocks are perched, flags poised, and boats bobbing in a sea of colour. That is where I enjoy cooking vegetarian food.

  The bed where I write and dictate – I rarely work at a desk – is an oak four-poster that was designed by Uwe to echo the curve of heavy beams in the ceiling, resplendent with an Aladdin’s cave of hangings, esoteric objects and birth symbols in crimson, scarlet and gold. Instead of a headboard there is an expanse of silk in a hexagonal patchwork sewn by my daughters and me when they were much younger. (Don’t look at the stitching too closely. It is the impression that matters!)

  I think modern furniture looks as good in it as antiques. I enjoy decorating with vivid curtains, hangings, patchwork, oriental kites, angels and dragons in bright pools of light, and objects I have made, often with the girls, in copper, silk and ceramic, together with flowery garlands, batik pictures and bold paintings. There are Polly’s wall frescoes and pictures on doors, Nell’s sculptures of mermaids and birthing women, and Indian and Moroccan rugs with fertility symbols spread on the dark wooden floors.