Birth Story

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

The anger and ridicule Gisele Bundchen attracted when she advocated a "worldwide law" requiring new mothers to breast-feed for six months mostly has to do, I would say, with the fact that mere mortals perceive she shares very few of the frustrations the rest of us deal with us on a daily basis.

But I think some of the rage comes from a certain rancor around the topic of breast-feeding, which has been presented in the last several years as the only acceptable choice for nourishing an infant, not only from a health standpoint, but also from a moral one. Not breast-feeding — for whatever reason, including such a worthy and often necessary one as a full-time job — has come to be regarded as thoughtless at best, abusive at worst.

But do women who reach for the formula deserve the sneers they get from breast-feeding partisans? Writing in The Atlantic last year, Hanna Rosin, journalist and mother of three, made "The Case Against Breast-Feeding," and an intriguing argument it is.

First, let it be said that Rosin did breast-feed her children. However, by No. 3, some of the negative aspects of breast-feeding — the huge investment of time it requires, and the toll Rosin believes it takes on the ideal of co-parenting with Dad, to name a couple — were making her wonder if the health benefits were really all they were cracked to be.

Rosin found evidence that they aren't. She writes:

Most of the claims about breast-feeding’s benefits lean on research conducted outside the lab: comparing one group of infants being breast-fed against another being breast-fed less, or not at all. Thousands of such studies have been published, linking breast-feeding with healthier, happier, smarter children. But they all share one glaring flaw.

The flaw is that the studies are observational, not randomized controlled trials, Rosin writes. Other variables than just breast-feeding might more easily affect the conclusions drawn from an observational study.

Exploring some of the studies that have given breast-feeding its good reputation, Rosin concludes that there are "clear indications" breast-feeding protects against gastrointestinal disease, at least in some cases, but only "murky correlations with a whole bunch of  long-term conditions." The evidence on enhanced intelligence in breast-fed individuals suggests "a small advantage," Rosin writes.

She writes:

So overall, yes, breast is probably best. But not so much better that formula deserves the label of “public health menace,” alongside smoking. Given what we know so far, it seems reasonable to put breast-feeding’s health benefits on the plus side of the ledger and other things—modesty, independence, career, sanity—on the minus side, and then tally them up and make a decision. But in this risk-averse age of parenting, that’s not how it’s done.

New mom Gisele Bundchen touched off a firestorm of criticism when she told the British edition of Harper's Bazaar that mothers around the world should be required by law to breast-feed for six months.

Gisele Bundchen

Boston Herald columnist Margery Eagan called Bundchen "a silly twit." Mark Marino, writing on CNN Entertainment's Marquee Blog, ventured that the 30-year-old Brazilian-born supermodel "might have made a boob of herself," based on responses from indignant readers of the blog.

Those included one woman identified as "Angela," who said that having "just popped out a kid" seemed to have given Bundchen the idea she "knows what's best for children and mothers."

Eagan admitted that her "catty little heart leaps with joy" to see a woman so "lucky in looks, in love, in life" whose "perfect foot" keeps finding its way into her "perfect pouty mouth," first touting her painless home birth eight months ago, now with her pronouncement that everyone should be legally required to breast-feed. And in that, Eagan probably stands in for a great many of us who can't help but notice that Bundchen's life is not exactly lived in the trenches.

Bundchen did back down from her provocative statement, writing in her blog, "I am not here to judge.... I think as mothers we are all just trying our best."

Of her backtracking, Eagan wrote, "Too late! Too late!"

But here's the thing. Bundchen has a right to her opinion (she did say it was her opinion), and she is in a position where people ask her her opinion and then print it up in glossy magazines.

Here's another thing: She's not wrong. She's not saying parents should hang their kids out the window by their heels; she's saying every mother should breast-feed for six months.

Sure, plenty of women can't breast-feed, others simply don't want to, and working mothers in this country, at least, have to be highly motivated to keep it up for any length of time. And the logistics — and the politics — of enacting a "worldwide law" mandating six months of breast-feeding for every baby make it, let's say, unlikely.

However, the health benefits of breast-feeding are well documented. The World Health Organization and the American Academy of Pediatrics join Bundchen in recommending that infants be breast-fed exclusively for at least six months. The AAP suggests mothers continue to breast-feed, even as a baby begins to eat other foods, for at least a year in all; the WHO recommends two years or more.

"Breast-feeding can decrease the incidence or severity of conditions such as diarrhea, ear infections and bacterial meningitis. Some studies also suggest that breast-feeding may offer protection against sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), diabetes, obesity and asthma among others (conditions)," the AAP stated in its 2005 position on breast-feeding.

Researchers recently teased out some of the specifics of the good things breast-feeding does for babies, concluding that breast-feeding represents "an intriguing strategy" to maximize an infant's chances for survival.

But breast-feeding still gets a bad rap from a squeamish public, and even, down in those trenches, from doctors.

"It is tragic that a supermodel-mom dispenses better advice than many doctors and most governmental agencies," wrote pediatrician/author Jay Gordon MD on the Huffington Post. "We must listen if her advice and high profile can save babies' lives."

Lastly, I must say that the world is full of women who think that the fact that they popped out a kid or two makes them experts on parenting. Just usually not as big an expert as people who have never popped out a kid.

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Amber Strocel is one of my favorite bloggers. A Vancouver, B.C. "crunchy granola mom" (and engineer), Strocel writes with equal aplomb about the pleasures of domesticity and more serious issues like Internet privacy.

Strocel also writes a good bit about childbirth, and one recent post got me thinking. In “Scare Tactics,” Strocel considers which kinds of stories about birth and breastfeeding women should share, in particular with pregnant women.

As anyone who has ever been pregnant knows, that bump is a powerful magnet for women who had a 78-hour labor, or whatever, and believe you need to hear a blow-by-blow description, complete with sound effects.

“I don’t see much value in sharing horror stories,” Strocel wrote, adding that during a discussion she shared on Twitter, others had disagreed, saying they thought “negative stories can prepare women” for the possibility of problems with birth or breastfeeding.

Strocel relates that during the birth of her first child, precipitated at 34 weeks by an infection, she experienced severe hemorrhaging, which required surgery and a blood transfusion.

“I was actually not all that afraid of labour when I was pregnant the first time around… Being armed with someone else’s story of severe blood loss wouldn’t have changed anything for me,” she writes. “Thinking about it, I believe there’s a difference between sharing a horror story that scares someone out of her pants, and useful information that you can use to avoid problems.”

Strocel offers an example of the latter: "If I had a very negative experience with a health care provider, I might share that with someone who was considering seeing the provider."

I agree that would be useful information, but the key would be to catch a woman before she had committed to that provider. By the time other people know a woman is pregnant, she has usually settled on a birth attendant.

In fact, I’m not sure any birth stories have utility for a pregnant woman. Let's think about a really positive one. Would hearing about supermodel Gisele Bundchen’s painless water birth really be encouraging to the average mortal? No pressure, girlfriend, but Gisele had zero pain.

I suspect one reason why people deluge pregnant women with birth stories is that we assume they have some interest in a topic we don't actually get to talk about that much.

The birth story occupies a place very near the heart of the narrative of most mothers’ lives. I have two birth stories myself. One tells of a vaginal delivery in a hospital that required foiling an obnoxious resident itching to perform a Caesarean-section; the other is a near-miraculous survival story.

I hardly ever tell these stories out loud. They are great stories, full of colorful characters, conflict and drama but, practically speaking, who can I press them on? The people who are willing to listen to me use words like “vagina” and “transfusion” do not include, for example, my brother-in-law.

As I think about these stories, though, it occurs to me that even though the near-death experience is more dramatic, the birth of my first daughter is more satisfying, more reassuring, more the kind of narrative prospective parents are looking for: A family overcomes obstacles to have the experience it was hoping for (more or less). It was certainly more pleasant to live through.

I'm not sure it is the more helpful of the two stories. Knowing what it takes to live through a calamity — in our case, speedy access to a competent surgeon and anesthesiologist, and plenty of blood — seems to me to be extremely useful information.

But perhaps the stories we mothers like best are the ones where the fair damsel saves herself.