From Celebration to Fear: A History of Women and Birthing

I include this brief account of the history of women and birthing, not to dwell on the negative past or to raise controversy, but rather as an explanation of how the societal influences of the early centuries caused birthing to go awry and left us clinging to a strong belief in the necessity of pain and anguish in childbirth.

Because the supposed “Curse of Eve” and its resulting impact upon birthing play such a major role in the minds of so many people in the Western world, it is important to examine this myth that has prevailed for so many centuries. In doing this, we learn that the belief in a curse that made pain a natural accompaniment of birthing has more to do with a certain time in history when religious men were trying to expand their dominance of society than it does in biology or observation.

Even today many people believe that to experience childbirth without pain would be contrary to the word and will of God. According to Helen Wessel, founder of Appletree Ministries and author of The Joy of Natural Childbirth: Natural Childbirth and the Christian Family, Hebrew scholars would differ. Wessel emphatically states, “There is no anthropological evidence to support the theological dogma that women of all cultures have universally regarded childbirth as an ‘illness’ or a ‘curse.’”

There is, in fact, much evidence to the contrary. In some of the less sophisticated societies where people have not been influenced by the beliefs of Western civilization, for instance, women with bodies that are physiologically identical to those of Western women give birth with relatively no fanfare and with a minimum of discomfort.

To understand the events that led to our present beliefs surrounding the “sorrow” with which women have supposedly been cursed, we have to look back to as early as 3000 b.c., when women had their babies naturally and with a minimum of discomfort, unless there was complication. Wessel cites many references in the Bible that extol the blessing of motherhood, the procreation of life, and the affection between husband, wife and children. She points to the time of Moses, when Jewish women had their babies quite easily and within a relatively short period of time, often without assistance. Historical records of the period just prior to the time of Jesus indicate that births were often accomplished in less than three hours. There is no record of a “curse” having played any part in their beliefs or their birthings.

In other parts of the world—Spain, France, the British Isles and old Europe—the lives of the people centered on nature and motherhood. They honored Mother Nature, Mother Earth and Mother Creator. Women were revered as the givers of life.

With no awareness of the link between intercourse and the conception of a child, it was believed that women brought forth children at will. As creators, they were thought to be connected to deity. Statues of the goddesses of these early people were of full-breasted women with bodies clearly depicting the ballooning abdomen of women about to give birth. These primal people regarded birthing as the highest manifestation of nature. When a woman gave birth, everyone gathered around her in the temple for the “celebration of life.” Birthing was a religious rite, and not at all the painful ordeal it came to be years later.

Women were nurturers and healers, developing, brewing and administering medicine. All healing came by the hands and the healing spirit of women. They collaborated and exchanged learning, overseen by the “wise women” of the village. Men were the gatherers of food, herbs and building materials. Their roles were different, yet equal.

Even when men took the lead in early medicine, there was no change in the attitude toward birth. Neither Hippocrates nor Aristotle, leaders of the Grecian School of Medicine, wrote of pain in their notes on normal, uncomplicated birth. Are we to believe that the presence of pain in normal birthing simply escaped the notice of these learned men?

Hippocrates and Aristotle believed that the needs and the feelings of women in childbirth were to be accommodated. They advocated having support persons attend a laboring woman. In fact, Hippocrates was the first to organize and present formal instruction to women who engaged in midwifery. Aristotle wrote of the mind-body connection and emphasized the importance of deep relaxation during childbirth. In the event of complication, women were brought into a relaxed state so that the complication could be resolved and treated.

Within the last century before the birth of Jesus, another learned man from the Grecian School, Soranus, put the writings of Aristotle and Hippocrates into book form. Soranus stressed the importance of listening to the needs and feelings of women giving birth and advocated using the powers of the mind to achieve relaxation to bring about easy birthing. Like his predecessors, Soranus included no mention of pain, except when he wrote of abnormal or complicated birth. Women were treated kindly, gently and joyfully during the natural occasion of giving birth. This attitude prevailed for thousands of years.

At the end of the second century a.d., however, there arose a widespread wave of contempt against women, and particularly the midwives, healers and wise women who had been so instrumental to birth. The hatred, unfortunately led by some misguided early Christians, escalated into what would later become an actual holocaust of women where healers, who had previously held a very favorable position in society, were executed because of their caring and healing skills.

Literally, few stones were left unturned as the leaders set out to redefine the role of women in both religion and society. The stone temples and altars of the people who worshipped nature were destroyed, and the womanly icons were smashed and buried. To ascribe any importance to the laws or functions of nature became a serious offense, and all writings dealing with natural cures were seized and buried. Regrettably, Soranus’s books met this sad fate, and the concept of natural birth was buried. It was at this time that St. Clement of Alexandria wrote: “Every woman should be filled with shame by the thought that she is a woman.”

Law now demanded that women be segregated during pregnancy and isolated during birthing. With authority over all medical practice and healing firmly ensconced in the hands of the priests and monks, doctors had to obtain permission to administer to the “deserving ill.” Since women were labeled seductresses and the resulting pregnancy was seen as the product of “carnal sin,” a laboring woman was not considered among the deserving ill. People in the medical field were forbidden to attend birthings, ensuring that no relief could be ­dispensed, even in the event of a complicated birth. Midwifery was abolished, leaving the laboring mother isolated, without support and terrified. By a series of decrees, birth, previously welcomed as a celebration of life, eroded into an excruciatingly painful, lonely and much-to-be-feared ordeal.

It was only at this time that what is now known as “The Curse of Eve” came to be embedded into biblical translations. Previously, there was no mention of a curse, except God’s curse upon the ground and its implication that humankind would now have to work to survive. With the new translation, women were to pay the price of original sin, and it was, indeed, a high one.

Through his own study into the Bible and from his association with biblical scholars, Dick-Read learned that the Hebrew word etzev, used sixteen times in the King James I version, is translated to mean “labor, toil and work” throughout most Bibles, but when the same translators referred to childbirth, the word was interpreted to mean “pain, sorrow, anguish or pangs.” Other scholars, too, point out that the prophets made no such reference to pain in their writings on childbirth. Wessel states that there was never an actual curse placed exclusively upon Eve. In Genesis, God uses the very same wording in speaking to Adam as to Eve. The translators, though, influenced by the terrible conditions surrounding birth, chose to translate the dictum delivered to Eve differently.

Finally, in the early sixteenth century, the lost writings of Soranus were discovered. The medical world took interest, and those in medicine who were driven by conscience defied the existing laws. The first book on obstetrics was written, based on the theories and teachings of the most profound medical philosophers and practitioners the world had yet known.

At this time, midwifery came back into practice, but it was looked upon as a dishonorable occupation “best suited to women to take care of the nasty business of giving birth.” In Germany, where the largest number of executions of healers occurred, Martin Luther wrote, “If women become tired, or even die, it does not matter. Let them die in childbirth. That’s what they are there for.” He conceived a title for midwives that expressed the prevailing beliefs of the time and, in itself, suggested pain. Weh mutters was the name he attached to the women who attended birthing mothers. Literally translated from the German, weh means pain, and mutter means mother— “mothers of woe.” There is no indication of the existence of this word prior to this time.

With the coming of the Renaissance and the “rebirth of learning,” birthing women fared better, although even the advent of chloroform, widely used for all medical procedures, did nothing to relieve their plight. Chloroform was denied to women in labor. This attitude toward women and birthing was not limited to Europe. When it was suggested that pain relief be given to women in labor, a New England minister responded that to do so would rob God of the pleasure of their “deep, earnest cries for help.” Once more, we see the misguided beliefs of man, not God, prevailing.

When we look back upon these events with our modern knowledge, we understand more clearly how fear of complication and resulting death, not fear of birthing, caused women to look upon labor with horror. Extreme fear created extreme tension, and the tension, in turn, resulted in a taut cervix, unable to perform its natural function. Those who lived through the ordeal, as well as those who witnessed it, attested to the agony that was experienced in birthing.

It wasn’t until well into the middle of the eighteenth century that doctors were allowed to attend women, but most were reluctant. The stigma of male physicians being involved in obstetrics was strong. As a result, those doctors who found their way to obstetrics were usually inept or alcoholics, but it didn’t matter because the conditions of birthing didn’t matter. Birthing mothers were seen as insignificant in the world of medicine.

In the late 1800s, when Queen Victoria insisted that she be given chloroform when she birthed, the door opened for women to have anesthesia in birthing. This, though, created another disaster that would last for years in European countries, as well as in the United States. Birthing began to move from the home into the hospital, not because birthing was too dangerous an experience to be accomplished in the home, but because the administration of anesthesia made it too dangerous to be accomplished in the home. Inability to safely monitor the administration of anesthesia led to all sorts of problems, including fatalities. So it was that women who sought anesthesia had to leave their homes and go to hospitals. Husbands were no longer a part of the birthing scene, and families had little control over their own birthings. A new era and a new approach to the way in which birth would occur had its initiation.

Once in hospitals, birthing mothers met another unkind fate. Maternity wards in hospitals were appallingly dirty. Infections from something as simple as unwashed hands ran rampant. Many women who went to hospitals for safety and good medical treatment died from infection that came to be commonly called “childbed fever.” The high rate of maternal and infant morbidity in hospitals was accepted because suffering and death in birthing were still believed to be decreed—in spite of the fact that there was a remarkably lower rate of complication or death among women who birthed in their own homes.

A 1913 study by the Carnegie Trust reported that while women and babies were dying in hospitals, birthing women in fishing villages and in the highlands of the British Isles, who had their babies in homes that they shared with lambs, chickens and other animals, experienced no deaths or major complications. Deaths in hospitals were the result of lack of sanitation and exposure to the contagion of illnesses of other patients, rather than complication or the danger of birthing. Nevertheless, deaths occurred, and the fear of death became even more strongly associated with giving birth.

It’s impossible to even think that a woman at this time could approach the birthing experience with anything but the most terrifying fear, knowing that in the event of a complication, at best, she would experience outrageous suffering, and at worst, she may never live through the ordeal. It was clear that birthing was no longer considered a celebration of life. In the eyes of women themselves, a painful birthing was the sentence that women were to endure throughout eternity.

Much of the credit for changing birthing conditions belongs to a woman—Florence Nightingale. Nightingale reestablished schools of midwifery and insisted that maternity wards adopt the same standards of sanitation and cleanliness as other wards in hospitals. Using her money-raising ability as clout, she saw to it that the inept, alcoholic doctors disappeared from the birthing scene and that women were treated kindly.

But it was too late. Once anesthesia was generally available for birthing, the pendulum swung very quickly from lack of supervision to overprescription. Early administration of drugs and anesthesia became the standard for all birthings—needed or not. Since it was believed that painful birthing was inevitable, women were given heavy doses of painkillers during the first part of labor and were administered general anesthesia as soon as there was any indication of crowning. Drugged births, where babies were pulled from the birth path with instruments, became the rule. Relief for the laboring woman and expediency for the medical staff ruled the day and, to a large extent, still does.

Today, in spite of evidence to the contrary, an incredible number of people in maternal services, and even women themselves, continue to accept the myth that pain is an inevitable part of birthing. It is widely thought that the best a woman can do is depend upon care providers to help them get through the experience, rather than learn how to prevent adverse incidents beforehand.

Artificial inducement and augmentation are being routinely administered without evidence-based indication in far too many situations. These drugs introduce pain into the birthing and create a slippery slope whereby additional drugs may be necessary to quell the pain brought on by the first drug. As a result, many families come away from their birthing experience with stories tinged with apology, disappointment and rationalization as to what “went wrong.” They speak of long periods of terrible pain, the administration of multiple drugs, of uteruses that won’t open, of surgical births, and mostly of feelings of helplessness. This kind of upheaval and, in some cases, trauma, cannot help but affect women and their babies.

Why are women having these experiences? Why do women’s bodies, perfectly created to birth, shut down even before they start labor? Why do so many women require that their babies be extracted surgically—a procedure that forty years ago was so infrequent that it was regarded with surprise?

The answer can be found in one word: fear.

How we give birth matters! What our babies experience shapes who they are. What a mother experiences at the very transition from maiden to mother changes her. Gentle, natural birth unlocks something primal at our very core that makes mothering easier [and] makes families stronger. . . . If parents would only realize that every single decision they make from conception onward influences the outcome of their birth, they could reclaim what they didn’t even know was lost.

Kim Wildner, Mother’s Intention