‘Don’t push yet.’
‘Get @#$%ed!’
‘Now, now, Juliette, you know you need to pant like a dog at this point.’
‘You do it then, if it’s so %^&ing easy.’
‘OK, now you can push.’
‘Don’t want to any more.’
‘Come on love, have a go …’
‘I HATE YOU! GO AWAY! WHERE ARE YOU
GOING? COME BACK!’
Ah, memories of the labour ward, or whatever they call it now. Probably now known as a best-practice-quality-assured-mutual-obligation extrusion facility complete with mission statement and vision commitment.
All you mums watching Birth Rites on SBS (8.30pm Thursday July 8) will remember, if you weren’t mercifully doped out at the time, how damned irritating everyone around you can be when you are trying to get a quart out of a pint pot. The main thing to remember is how important it is not to give a labouring woman a gun.
Trying to get the process right for most women without causing death and injury in the tricky business of birth is a balancing act between the constant need for emotional support and the occasional need for machines that go ping. (Monty Python fans will remember that machine, and the breezy unconcern of the obstetrician—John Cleese, of course.) If it was daunting for an urban woman, imagine what it must be like for Indigenous women, often transported far from their families in centralised hospitals to give birth in ways that are cut off from their culture. Birth Rites examines how this causes terrible social and medical problems: women will often avoid the local clinics until it is too late in their pregnancies to send them away into isolation from their families.
That reminded me of a documentary I saw on the ABC years ago, about the discovery of the need for basic hygiene in obstetrics. In Vienna in the early 19th century, pregnant women would get their cab drivers to circle the hospital until they were almost on the point of delivery, because they knew that the longer they were in the place, the more likely they were to die of puerperal fever, at the filthy hands of ignorant doctors. The paradox is a cruel one: in Australia at the exact same time, in parts where Indigenous societies hadn’t been reached by the white colonists, they were having babies cleanly and naturally, as they had done for countless thousands of years. The 21st century urban hospital system still threatens Indigenous existence, if not by