Birth Story

Mother's Day seems like a good time to make a resolution to get back into more regular posting on Birth Story. So let it begin!

With Nora on the couch

This is a picture of my daughter Nora, who is now 24, during her first few days home, relaxing on the couch with me. I don't know why she is sitting at the other end of the couch, but this is my husband's favorite early picture of us together.

Being a mom changed my life in big ways and small. I remember how disoriented I felt that first week, adjusting to nursing and my new post-pregnancy body. My daughters, Nora and Maeve, are two of my favorite people, and Mother's Day is one of my favorite days in the whole year.

Happy Mother's Day to all the other moms (and everyone else) reading this post today. Have a wonderful day!

The birth Jan. 7 of Blue Ivy Carter, daughter of hip-hop stars Beyonce and Jay-Z  (Shawn Carter), had Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan in a tailspin this week.

Beyonce

Other new parents complained of disruptions and even security breaches as the celebrity family reportedly took over part of the hospital's sixth floor for a private, customized labor-delivery area for $1 million-plus. (A hospital spokesman said the Carters occupied an "executive suite" and paid the standard rate for it.)

Neil and Rozz Nash-Coulon were upset at being detained in the neonatal intensive care unit after visiting their newborn twins, while Edgar Ramirez reported he was refused entrance to visit his baby in the the NICU unit. Windows were covered, private security guards issued orders, and security cameras were even disabled, families complained.

"The security of our children is at risk when you cover security cameras," Ms. Nash-Coulon told Nina Bernstein of the New York Times.

And, all the secrecy fed rumors. Beyonce's website states that "Baby Blue" was "delivered naturally," while portions of the blogosphere ran with a report that the birth was a C-section. And there's even a contingent that holds that Beyonce's pregnancy was a fake, that a surrogate mom bore Blue.

Tina Fey and Jane Krakowski, stars of the sitcom 30 Rock on NBC, told The Today Show's Matt Lauer that they both had their babies at Lenox Hill Hospital as well. Said Fey, "My celebrity treatment at Lenox Hill involved taking a group breast-feeding class in a closet."

The birth in Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part I was not as scary as I thought it would be. (If you don't want to read about the film's ending, stop reading here.) Breaking Dawn is a preteen fantasy through and through, so the birth of Bella's half-human, half-vampire baby winds up looking fairly tidy and vaguely menstrual, even if it does involve blades and teeth. (No trial of labor for Bella.)

Kristen Stewart as Bella Swan

Will Breaking Dawn leave a generation of young girls with tocophobia — fear of childbirth? My guess is that it will not. The birth happens fast, for one thing, and it's all pretty implausible. The baby appears to be a normal baby, though about six months old, and functions for the rest of the movie in a doll-like capacity.

But Bella Swan — the teenager who falls in love with the vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) and marries him in this, the first half of the screen adaptation of the fourth and final book in Stephenie Meyers' Twilight saga — does die in childbirth in the film. Her death has been prophesied, so it isn't unexpected, but the sight of her still, gray form on the table where her baby was born is upsetting.

However, the second half of Breaking Dawn is scheduled for release one year from now, so let's just say that birth for Bella is a defining moment. We haven't seen the last of her.

Breaking Dawn is rated PG-13.

We here in the United States will be celebrating the birth of our country on Monday, July 4 — a different kind of birth story from the one we usually consider at Birth Story.

Given the difficult times many Americans (and others) are now experiencing, Paul Simon's wistful "American Tune," performed here during a 1981 reunion concert with Art Garfunkel, seems to me a suitably reflective way to head into the holiday weekend.

The rousing anthems and the fireworks will still be there on the holiday itself. I hope it's a happy one for you.

The way the British royal family handles special occasions is interesting, to me anyway, because everything they do has to be examined in advance through history, tradition and protocol. Then the next day, many, many other people run out and do as close to the same thing as they possibly can.

Birth is no different.

The last few generations of the royal family have provided boatloads of drama that have kept the tabloids chattering and the rest of us agog — romance, opulence, star-crossed lovers, betrayal, tragedy, untimely death.

This week, in the runup to the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton, Birth Story is going to look at a few royal births.

We begin with Prince Charles, William's father, born at Buckingham Palace on Nov. 14, 1948, to then-Crown Princess Elizabeth, 22, and her husband, Prince Philip.

Philip famously played squash with a friend in another part of the palace during his son's birth. To be fair, in 1948 most fathers were at best pacing in hospital waiting rooms during their children's births. And, Philip did bring Elizabeth carnations and Champagne afterwards.

Just two weeks after Charles's birth, in a letter recently sold at auction, Elizabeth wrote a cousin, a bridesmaid at her 1947 wedding,"The baby is very sweet, and Philip and I are enormously proud of him. I still find it hard to believe that I really have a baby of my own!"

Photo by Cecil Beaton

Yipes! That was a long hiatus! So sorry. Hope not to do that again.

I am back on Birth Story with huge new respect for teachers, after serving winter quarter as an undergraduate lab instructor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. What teachers do in the classroom, I discovered, is the tip of the iceberg of the job.

I am back. Yes! So back to our topic, sort of. Well, a tangent, actually.

Nearly every time I Google "birth news" looking for, you know, something to blog about — my topic is birth — I come up with some permutation on the "birther" flap calling for President Obama to produce (on a daily basis, as far as I can tell) his birth certificate. Otherwise, critics will assume he was born in Kenya, his father's country of origin.

Is he? Or isn't he?

Donald Trump and Whoopi Goldberg got into a dustup on "The View" last week about Obama's alleged reluctance to produce his birth certificate. (Just Google "birth news.")

The next day, "The View" ladies showed what they said was a copy of Obama's birth certificate.

Ben Smith at Politico wrote yesterday that the document Trump claimed was his own birth certificate, produced to needle the President, is not in fact Trump's official birth certificate. (But then Trump did come up with the right one.)

All of which just tells you that you can't go wrong, publicity-wise, getting a corner of this issue, or non-issue, as the case may be. Maybe I'll get a lot more hits today than I do ordinarily, writing about boring old childbirth.

The Arizona legislature is considering legislation that would require the state to sign off on proof of U.S. birth from presidential candidates. (They wouldn't let me teach at Medill until I produced proof of U.S. birth. Surely presidential candidates don't get a pass on that.)

The House version of the Arizona bill calls for evidence that that baby dropped onto U.S. soil, while the Senate version of the bill includes a definition of a "natural" U.S. birth as one to individuals who were U.S. citizens at the time.

I think both those elements have to be there, actually. That is, proof of either of those things ought to be enough, and I think maybe we need some laws to clarify that.

Even though some people go to great lengths to manipulate the law to convey U.S. citizenship to their infants like, allegedly, the Chinese women Jennifer Medina writes about in the New York Times today, it is important for anyone born in the United States to be an "automatic" citizen. Anything else is a total repudiation of what the United States has been, and stood for, for more than two centuries.

At the same time, we live in a small world. Pregnant U.S. citizens travel all the time for work and pleasure, and probably some other reasons, too, and they shouldn't be terrified about losing their children's full rights of citizenship if they happen to be abroad when their water breaks.

The Administration and numerous officials of the state of Hawaii, where Obama was by all accounts born on Aug. 4, 1961, have repeatedly confirmed the President's birth to a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil. Two for two. (So that's settled, right?)

And whatever you think of Barack Obama, he is a stellar example of the promise the United States has made to its residents, going even beyond its citizens — that if you work hard, the sky is the limit on what you can achieve.

Well, that's my two cents for today. It's nice to be back, although like teaching, blogging is a whole lot more time-consuming than I thought it would be before I actually tried it.

Happy spring, dear reader!

And so we bid adieu to 2010, Birth Story's first year of life.

My Birth Story blog began on Jan. 3 of this year, and this is my 151st post, so I came very close to my goal of posting three times a week.

I have learned a lot. People like compelling stories, posts about history, about medical pioneers, and about advances in the field of obstetrics, “the art and science of managing pregnancy, labor and puerperium (the time after delivery).” They also like stories about celebrities — what a surprise!

Having written about the posts readers liked best, now I would like to showcase some posts from 2010 I especially like. I am really proud of the work I have done on Birth Story, and I like many of the readers' favorites too, but these additional posts are also worth an extra look.

What were your favorite Birth Story posts? I would love to hear from you. Here are a baker's dozen of mine:

1/22 The basics of birth safety

1/27 A Cesarean section in Philadelphia

2/5 A health consumer's BFF

2/22 Pregnant women and drug trials

4/23 To the Lighthouse

5/7 The mothers of Johns Hopkins Medicine

5/14 Riddle me this

6/18 The other Flexner

6/21 Being there

8/18 We dream for our children

8/26 Breast-feeding story: Maeve

11/17 Practical magic

12/22 Your birth plan, courtesy of The Bloggess

Well, go figure. My very most popular post by far this year was one I wrote for Women's History Month that had very little to do with the Birth Story per se.

My top post for 2010 was about Anne Hutchinson, a midwife in the Massachusetts Colony, who deftly though unsuccessfully defended herself against heresy charges in 1638. The colony's governors were so shaken that they embedded into the mission of the new Harvard College the mandate to train religious leaders rigorously enough that they would never again be so intellectually pummelled.

Anne figured in another top post as well, "A monstrous birth," about the danger midwives and mothers alike faced after anomalous births in the American colonies.

My second most popular post was a recent one about Ian Shapira's Facebook-driven story in the Washington Post chronicling the death of new mother Shana Greatman Swers.

Supermodel Gisele Bundchen came in third with a post about her much ridiculed assertion that all new mothers should be required by law to breast-feed.

Here are Birth Story's 10 most popular posts of 2010:

1. Anne Hutchinson, Colonial midwife  3/1/10

2. A sad Facebook story 12/10/10

3. A "boob" on the right side of breast-feeding 8/9/10

4. A "monstrous" birth  3/3/10

5. The Pregnancy Meeting 2/8/10

6. Amniotic fluid embolism 1/14/10

7. Fascinated with blood 6/28/10

8. The Frontier Nursing Service  3/15/10

9. The Goodriches one year later  1/11/10

10. The mother of the Apgar score  3/19/10

Following one topic, childbirth, for an entire year has given me an unusual perspective on what is happening on that front, both here in the United States and also globally.

If you ask me, the newly apparent muscle of the holistic birth community was the most important “birth story” of 2010. One sign of this was the passage of the so-called Midwifery Modernization Act in New York, which eliminated a requirement that midwives obtain a written practice agreement from a physician or hospital to practice in New York State.

Also, as we just discovered from a new report from the Centers for Disease Control, released last week, birth by Cesarean section reached a new high, 32.9 percent of births in 2009, up from 32.3 in 2008. The steadily rising rate — up every year since 1996, when the rate was 20.7 — has been a major story all year.

That CDC report also showed the birth rate for U.S. teen-agers hit its lowest level last year since records began to be kept seventy years ago — 39.1 births per 1,000 teens, down from 41.5 per 1,000 in 2008. The record low held true for all racial and ethnic groups.

A couple of other big birth stories of 2010, sadly, revolved around the fact that too many mothers are still dying in childbirth.

In March, Amnesty International called out the American childbirth establishment on a rising rate of maternal mortality in a report called “Deadly Delivery: The Maternal Health Care Crisis in the USA.” The human-rights advocacy organization pointed out that while the United States spends more on health care than any other country in the world, “maternal mortality ratios have increased from 6.6 deaths per 100,000 live births in 1987 to 13.3 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2006.”

Many other groups joined in that call for changes to improve birth safety in this country.

Meanwhile, in the developing world, the United Nations’ Millennium Goal 5, which aims to bring down rates of maternal mortality by three-quarters in places like sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia, is the subject of much scrutiny, with a major push in some places creating bright spots in what appears to be a generally gloomy picture with just five years to go.

Pregnant Graffiti by Petteri Sulonen / Wikimedia Commons

Jesus' nativity, the son of God born of a virgin mother, is one of the great mysteries of Christianity.

The story we can grasp more easily is of his humble beginnings in a manger. Most people who were hoping for the Messiah expected him to be born in power and sumptuousness, but Jesus' birth attendants were the animals whose home he shared in his first days.

One lesson for all of us in Jesus' birth is that we cannot judge the value of any human life, as weighed against another.

Every human being enters the world from the body of his mother in a moment of supreme vulnerability. Regardless of the circumstances, for mother and baby alike, it is one of the most fundamental human experiences any of us will ever have.

Every birth is a new beginning, for the child, for her family, and for the world, in a way. Every birth should be joyful, peaceful, transcendent.

Have a happy Christmas!

"Adoration of the Shepherds" by Mikael Toppelius / Wikimedia Commons