Halloween Horrors: The Midwife-Witch

Birthing Options: Staying Home

Crone, noun
A wizened elderly woman. Feminine version of sage.

It’s Halloween, and since I happen to be a certifiable crone, I’ll begin this last chapter of the series on birthing options with some tales of witchcraft and bloody deeds of persecution that at one time threatened to eradicate the very existence of the ‘Medicine Women’ who traditionally attended the birth of new generations. The wise crones and grandmothers who tended the health, love lives and fertility of mothers, daughters and sisters back when the patriarchs of shamanism believed women to be chattel property like horses or goats, untouchable in their fertile ‘curse’ and dutifully banished from the household entirely for the duration of their menses.

It’s not a pretty history. From Witches, Midwives, and Nurses by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English:

“Women have always been healers. They were the unlicensed doctors and anatomists of western history. They were abortionists, nurses and counsellors. They were pharmacists, cultivating healing herbs and exchanging the secrets of their uses. They were midwives, traveling from home to home and village to village. For centuries women were doctors without degrees, barred from books and lectures, learning from each other and passing on experience from neighbor to neighbor and mother to daughter. They were called “wise women” by the people, witches or charlatans by the authorities. Medicine is part of our heritage as women, our history, our birthright.”

Medicine women - primarily midwives - were persecuted mercilessly by the Medieval church that controlled medical education and practice on behalf of the ruling classes. This persecution lasted well into the so-called “Age of Reason” [14th through 17th centuries] and swept Europe before it again reared its ugly head in the American colonies with the famous witch-trials of Massachusetts.

The extent of the persecution is breathtaking. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries there were tens of thousands of executions - usually live burning at the stake - and some historians claim millions were eventually killed. 85-90 percent of those killed were women.

As the feudal and religious war against women healers waned in the 18th century, the rise of male-dominated allopathic medicine took place and the battle against midwives was taken over by the medical profession and its control of regulatory law. Beginning in 1896, the U.S. medical community embarked on well-documented, well-coordinated and well-financed campaign to eliminate the midwife from the practice of her own profession.

To pull this off doctors had to re-define pregnancy and childbirth as disease rather than normal reproduction not fundamentally dangerous to mother or child if properly managed. By the 1920s a shift from home birth to hospital births had taken place, and the death rates for both mothers and babies soared as a result of routine medical and surgical interventions in the birth process. To this day the United States ranks at the bottom of all industrialized nations in infant and maternal mortality rates.

Yet there is good news, even though the war against midwives continued unabated medically and legislatively through the last part of the 20th century. States are again licensing midwives to attend uncomplicated births at birthing centers and in homes, as the statistics have demonstrated that healthier mothers and babies result from treating the birthing process as a normal organic function rather than a dread disease.

Homebirth 101 offers a sobering look at those statistics, and how they compare with hospital outcomes of overly medicated, overly managed birth. The American Pregnancy Association offers a fine list of questions and answers relating to the decision to give birth at home, what conditions would indicate that hospital birth would be safer, and what to expect if one chooses to give birth at home.

The first home birth I attended was when my little sister gave birth to my niece in Florida in 1984. I couldn’t imagine how she’d get through it without painkillers, as it was her first baby and she had a history of ER visits once a month just for menstrual cramps ever since she was a teenager. Yet the OB who had partnered with the only licensed midwife in the northern part of the state was forced to pull out of his partnership by peer pressure, and it was too late for the pregnant women who had already paid for the service to get other doctors. They had no choice - it was ER births or home with the overworked midwife who no longer had a clinic.

Surprisingly to me, the labor and birth went without a hitch even though the midwife (who had attended three other births that day) didn’t show up until it was pretty much over. We’d done our Bradley classes and were well prepared to manage the entire process if we had to. My second home birth experience was when my elder daughter gave birth to #1 grandson in my baby sister’s guest bedroom. Different midwife, and baby sister is an R.N., there was a last minute complication (cord strangulation) that I am quite sure would have resulted in a dead baby if we’d been at a hospital. Our midwife handled it quickly and ably, and that grandson starts college next fall.

My pregnant younger daughter hasn’t informed me of her birthing decision yet, probably hasn’t entirely made up her mind. But if she wants to have Sunshine at home, I’ll certainly be there to help. And I won’t be too scared to know what to do. I can help with cleaning and food, I can help distract her from hard labor, I can keep the water boiling and can even catch that baby if Daddy passes out. I’ve attended 6 other home births since, they all worked out fine.

After all, I am a certifiable crone.

Links:

Is Homebirth for You?

Home Birth

The Fall of Midwives

The war on midwives (part 3)

Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife-Witch

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