A Passion for Birth

by Sheila Kitzinger

  FIONA: ‘I wish I’d been stronger.’

  CALL-TAKER: ‘Yes it’s very, very easy looking back on situations to think ‘I wish I’d been stronger, I wish I’d done that. The point is those things happened and you did whatever you could under the circumstances to the best of your ability.’

  FIONA: ‘You’re right. And we always could have done more I suppose, everyone thinks.’

  CALL-TAKER: ‘Yes, yes and none of us are perfect and we all have ideals of behaviour don’t we. And some of us sort of drive ourselves a bit about it and demand an awful lot of ourselves.’

  FIONA: ‘Thank you for saying that. Nobody else has said that.’

  Celia and I worked together to analyse more than 400 phone calls to the Birth Crisis help-line examining the interaction between Sheila and the callers and using what we learned for workshops with midwives and other caregivers.

  We looked at ways in which they started and ended, for example, how a call-taker shows she is listening without interrupting, and the use of silence.

  Members of the group form pairs and a call is played and then suddenly stops. Participants acting the part of call-takers are asked to follow this with what they would say next. The callers say how they felt about it and there is general discussion of the benefits and disadvantages of the way the conversation is going.

  There is no script to follow. What matters is how the caller experiences what is said and not said.

  A conversation includes sounds and exclamations as well as words. Story-prompts include, ‘Okay, tell me what the problem is’, ‘Tell me about it’, ‘What happened?’ and reactions when a woman is choking in distress or breaks down weeping: ‘You are feeling pretty rotten aren’t you?’

  These contrast with call-takers’ comments that demand answers, sometimes quite aggressively, ‘Why are you crying?’, ‘Have you got PTSD?’ or ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  We noted ways in which a call-taker might show understanding. Saying ‘I understand’ is just a claim to understand. But non-verbal reactions like a sharp intake of breath (to show understanding that a procedure was painful) or a long drawn out low-pitched ‘ahhhhh’ to show empathetic understanding of a caller’s disappointment displays understanding at an emotional level. And words can seem like interruptions whereas these ‘reaction tokens’ are often done in overlap with a woman’s talk and encourage her to continue.

  In the discussion with Fiona I use the terms ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘our’. Whilst telling Fiona that she is not to blame for what has happened to her, I take Fiona’s ‘we’ and include myself in the category of ‘people who could have done more’ and who ‘are not perfect’. This treats Fiona’s feelings as common to the human condition, shared by caller and call-taker, rather than being Fiona’s idiosyncratic failing.

  We believe that conversation analysis is a valuable resource for midwifery education.87

  Australia, 2007

  Keith Hartmann was a young registrar at the John Radcliffe Hospital who many years later, when I met up with him in Sydney, Australia, told me that Professor Alec Turnbull made the decision to stop inducing labours routinely when Iain Chalmers’ research on oxytocin revealed that it had harmful side-effects, together with my writing about women’s negative experiences of induction. I was surprised to learn that I had had any effect at all on his practice. But within a matter of days the induction rate was reduced.

  Keith had taken over an old house in the Paddington area of Sydney when I was lecturing in Australia in 2007 and had established the Mothers’ Retreat to give skilled and sensitive post-natal care and breastfeeding help to new mothers in hotel surroundings, with a superb chef and one-to-one midwifery care.

  The Royals

  Saying ‘no’ to hospital, making an informed decision to give birth in a place of their own choosing, is vital for women to reclaim the experience.88

  But there are signs that hospitals are changing. Diana brought fresh air to royalty, and Prince Charles continued to do the same. She was much criticised, but her contribution to reclaiming birth for women started radical changes in hospitals. During the pregnancy with her first baby, the private wing of St Mary’s, Praed Street, rang me to ask what equipment I would advise so that she could give birth in an upright position. I said that Charles looked strong enough to hold her. And that is what happened. It was the first active royal birth – a contrast to the Queen’s reflection that with modern anaesthesia birth had become ‘a sleep and a forgetting’.89

  In 2013, Kate and William gave birth in the same hospital, and, using self-hypnosis to enable Kate to centre down, experienced it as a spontaneous process for which a woman’s body is perfectly equipped.

  Entertaining An Audience

  After a series of operations on my hips and oesophageal tract and dental surgery I was anxious that I wouldn’t have the energy or mental focus to give of my best at the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) Student Conference at Telford in November 2013.

  It was quite a long journey to get there, I was walking with great difficulty, and worried that I might let down the crowded professional audience. In all my lectures I aim to engage, communicate and act.

  In fact, it went well and I was pleasantly surprised at the reaction. At any rate, the conference report included an enthusiastic section about my contribution:

  ‘And then, the crème de la crème of speakers, Professor Sheila Kitzinger took to the stage. The RCM could hardly have chosen a more apt speaker. Professor Kitzinger is an activist for natural childbirth, a social anthropologist and an author, but more importantly she is a believer in women and nature and the power of the female body to create life. She described labour and birth using the most beautiful imagery and terms, allowing us all to join in her belief that labour and birth need not be painful and frightening but can instead be “awesome” and “thrilling” and “powerful”. She painted a picture where women transcend and become one with the demands of their bodies, where they recognise the sensual aspect of the experience and allow it to become a natural part of labour and birth without shame or embarrassment. Because if the 84-year-old is not embarrassed to speak in frank terms about the beauty of birth, why should we be? And she was breathtakingly good. A hush fell over the room when she spoke and I think every student in attendance was captivated by her descriptions of labour and birth. I only hope I am privileged enough to see labour as she sees it and to end my career feeling as inspired as I do today.’

  Heterosexuality: A Challenge

  I did not plan to be heterosexual, of course. If I had known my three radical lesbian feminist daughters then I’d probably never have made that decision. I just was. A child of patriarchy, I was shaped by it. I expected to love a man, and did. I married, made a home, had a family, established deep loyalties.

  When our eldest daughter, Celia, turned 17 in the early 70s she was in her first term at Bryanston School in Dorset. It used to be a single sex school, for boys, one of those independent schools in which they opened up to girls in the sixth form quite simply to civilise the boys. She only managed three months there and then was expelled for suspected lesbianism.

  Celia described herself in a paper in Feminism and Psychology90 as ‘of the generation growing up as Martin Luther King’s impassioned “I have a dream” speech – a demand for freedom and justice for American “Negroes” – was broadcast on crackling radios across the world; as heated public debates raged about the international community’s response to the massacre and starvation in Biafra; and as the Aldermaston protest launched to a powerful British nuclear disarmament movement. I was a teenager when the UK Government responded to feminist pressure by enacting a startling piece of legislation (the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act) requiring employers to give women “equal pay for equal work”; and – like everyone else I knew – I boycotted the products of apartheid South Africa and joined the protests against the killing of Steve Biko in police custody. These struggles against oppression and injustice were discussed over the family
dinner table and raised in Quaker meetings for worship on Sundays. My collection of badges/buttons include “ban the bomb”, “power to the people”, “stuff the system”, “silence is the voice of complicity” and “equal pay NOW!” But I knew nothing about lesbian and gay issues. Homosexuality was never discussed as a compelling issue of political justice.’

  In the 70s homosexuality was still seen as pathological – a condition to be remedied by treatment. Mothers were largely responsible for their children growing up ‘abnormal’. It came from having a weak mother and an overbearing father, or ‘a severe domineering mother and a weak father, or an absent father and a mother trying to be both mother and father to a lonely child’. Even an author who later came out gay himself claimed that homosexuals ‘would like to be considered not seriously deviant, but healthy, harmless, and law-abiding until proven otherwise’.91

  As Celia says, “‘Healthy, harmless and law-abiding” was no kind of positive self-image for a teenage lesbian steeped in the moral and political values of civil disobedience and struggles for social justice.’

  Thirty years after she was expelled from Bryanston School the chaplain, Alan Shrimpton, wrote asking her for an entry to the school Year Book, by which time she had published four books and numerous articles on gender and society. She replied, ‘Bryanston back in my life again? Wanting information about my books dealing with lesbian and gay issues?! Wow – hasn’t the world changed in the last 30 years, and thank goodness for that!’

  The Chaplain responded saying he sympathised totally with her feelings about her treatment and treasured the image of me storming the Headmaster’s study – ‘WONDERFUL – and yes, please write a piece about it!’

  Uwe

  My husband, Uwe, and I share fundamental values. Uwe’s father was of Jewish lineage, so as a child Uwe was classified as a half-breed ‘Mischling’ in Nazi Germany and an enemy alien in Britain. I first encountered him (briefly) at a meeting exploring the problems and challenges of building a better society. We were anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-discrimination of any kind. We called for World Government, international understanding, and peace.

  We were trying to analyse society and understand human behaviour. When we married in the Quaker Meeting House at Oxford, we committed ourselves not only to each other, but to work for political and social change as equals, ‘flying wing to wing’. My relationship with him, and the discussions we have, help me define my feminism with more precision, in different ways, but just as powerfully, as my relationships with my daughters.

  Uwe, too, is a campaigner. He is passionate about human rights, international peace and building strong supranational institutions both in Europe and world-wide. He loved his first job working with a band of dedicated idealists at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg where he was its first British economist. Those were the heady days of designing and constructing the European Community. In 1956, since Britain refused to join, he returned to Oxford, using his Fellowship at Nuffield College, his books and his frequent TV exposure as platforms to argue his case. And in January 1973, as soon as Britain did join, he was appointed Political Adviser to the first British Vice-president of the Brussels Commission, Churchill’s larger-than-life son-in-law Christopher Soames. In fact for most of the 70s he worked on the continent – in Brussels, at the University of Paris and as Dean of the European Management Institute in Fontainebleau – flying home at weekends.

  Having pioneered European Studies at Oxford in the 50s, in the 80s he returned to champion Management Studies. That was a subject much despised in Oxford. But he organised Templeton as a Management College of the University (and became its founding President). That prepared the way for the new Oxford Business School.

  He always put a lot of energy and enthusiasm into voluntary work, particularly start-ups and reformist initiatives. He was founding Chairman of the Committee for Atlantic Studies, the Major Projects Association and, after the Yugoslav wars, the Campaign for Civil Courage based in Sarajevo. He served on the Councils of Oxfam, the European Movement and Chatham House, and – while at Harvard – of Institutes for Conflict Management and for Global Leadership. He was President of the British Alliances Françaises and is still Patron of Asylum Welcome. So, if we rarely flew wing to wing, we were and are still birds of a feather!

  Of course, discussions with a man are different from those with women. I acknowledge that compromise with men can easily become treachery to women. I realise that I walk on a tight-rope. Yet I look at who I am and where I am and try to determine how I can use this creatively. Women are under constant pressure to service the men in their lives. When they give birth they are controlled by a male-dominated, autocratic, hierarchical medical system. Many remember birth as a kind of rape. In challenging the male model of childbirth and offering the knowledge they need if they are to make informed choices between alternatives, question medical authority and develop self-confidence, I strive towards reclaiming our bodies in childbirth – to take birth back for women.

  My politics spring from powerful personal experience. But it is vital to go beyond the purely personal and specific. My own birth experiences were very positive, and it would be simple for me to talk only about the joy of birth. Yet I spend much of my time listening to women who have been subjected to violence in childbirth, and my political understanding has been sharpened by awareness of the abuse that many women suffer.

  My starting point was women’s satisfaction and fulfilment in the experience of birth. What I have learnt has opened my eyes to women’s rights, rights to informed choice, humane care, the control of our own reproductive health. How we give birth is part of a much wider challenge that concerns our lives as a whole, women’s lives everywhere in the world.

  Maternal deaths are the second biggest killer of women of reproductive age (after HIV/AIDS). Every year, nearly 300,000 women die due to complications in pregnancy and childbirth – 99 per cent of them in developing countries.92

  The concept of ‘freedom’ in childbirth must mean more than freedom from pain, freedom from unnecessary intervention, or freedom to do our own thing. It means a whole range of reproductive freedoms for women everywhere: freedom to choose whether or not to have a child in the first place, the right to free contraception, safe abortion, freedom from compulsory sterilisation, the right to adequate health care, freedom from grinding poverty that causes stillbirth and neonatal death, and freedom from exploitation by multinational companies who dump drugs in the Third World and offer ‘free gifts’ of formula milk to new mothers, with the result that lactation fails and babies die from dehydration and diarrhoea. In the same way, the concept of ‘freedom’ as applied to heterosexuality and lesbianism is not simply a matter of personal choice, but the social and political structures within which choices are made.

  I didn’t plan my life. Instead, I have taken opportunities. It may even be that in challenging me heterosexuality has somehow also energised me.

  Celia and Sue

  Same Sex Marriage Legal, 29 March 2014

  The legislation of same sex marriage was lavishly covered by the media. The Sunday Times reported this interview with Celia:

  My Week: Celia Kitzinger

  My wife and I are so glad I resisted the order to marry a horse93

  Nuclear Threat

  Last week the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act came into force, and my marriage to my wife of 11 years, Sue Wilkinson, was finally recognised by the British Government. It has been a long battle for legal recognition since we got married in Vancouver in August 2003, because when we came back to the UK in 2004 we were legal strangers.

  We expressed concern to the government, but with the Civil Partnership Act about to pass, they told us our marriage would be recognised as a civil partnership. A heterosexual couple who married in Canada would have their marriage recognised in the UK, and it seemed unfair ours wasn’t. We went to court, but the government intervened to say it thought our marriage shouldn’t be accepted as a marriage. The judge reje
cted our application, saying it would threaten the nuclear family.

  That was only eight years ago, though it did seem outdated at the time. I didn’t think that in my lifetime I would be legally married.

  Victory in Canada

  Sue and I met in 1984 at a conference. We’re both psychologists and we went to hear each other’s papers and then got chatting in the bar. Soon we became friends, but it wasn’t until 1990 that we became a couple. In 2003 Sue began a two year job at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, and I used to visit her. It was a particularly exciting time, as the campaign was being fought to change the law in Canada during her first six months there. Campaigners were opposing civil partnerships, which they said were second best.

  Whenever I returned to England, Stonewall would be campaigning for civil partnerships, saying marriage was a heterosexual institution. It was a strange experience shuttling between the gay movements in the two countries, because they had such different views. We didn’t make the decision to get married until a few weeks before we did, but it was an amazing thing to be able to do.

  Stonewalled

  It was a struggle when we got back to the UK to fight what we saw as discrimination – that our marriage wasn’t recognised. During the trial the judge agreed we were discriminated against, though he still ruled against us. We were supported a great deal by OutRage!, but Stonewall was a dead loss. We didn’t have the gay movement solidly behind us – in fact it felt far from that. Stonewall at the time felt that civil partnerships were a special gay thing and that Sue and I were assimilating into a heterosexual model by wanting marriage. We were quite a visible anomaly. People felt more able to take potshots than they do now. We got some amazing stuff sent to us. One person claimed it was like marrying a horse. They said, ‘If you can have gay marriage, why not bestiality?’ My sister drew a wonderful cartoon of me in full bridal regalia marrying a horse. It was very funny.