Childbirth

I've seen some hype in the media about the birth scene from the new "Twilight" movie.

As a disclaimer - all I've read of the books is what snatches I skimmed while pretending to read so that I'd have a cover for watching potential shoplifters at my old BYU bookstore job. From this I gathered that the story premise was pretty cool, but the simple sentence structure and the nauseating co-dependency of the hero and heroine completely erased the appeal of it for me. I don't mean this to be a review of the books, since I've not read them in their entirety.

Back to the childbirth scene. Because I'm somewhat (you know, just a bit) fascinated by women's issues, childbirth and breastfeeding in particular, the headlines about the birth scene in the new movie caught my attention. Out of curiosity, I read just the chapters immediately surrounding and including the birth scene, and was shocked by the amount of blood, the overall tense feeling of the narrative, and the inevitable association of death with the childbirth experience.

There were things that resonated with my experience with birth - Bella wanting to immediately hold the baby, the "it doesn't matter what happens to me, save the baby!" feeling.

But. So much of it was so overwhelmingly frightening. And childbirth does not have to be that way. I've done natural (no intervention during...though the hospital where Bee was born made me have a saline drip IV to have a line in place just in case, and they did give me medications afterward to stop hemorrhaging) childbirth twice (and plan to have any subsequent children in the same way unless complications necessitate another course of action). It was an amazing, empowering, beautiful experience. Even though it hurt like nothing I'd ever imagined (including kidney stones), and in one case I lost enough blood to make Ben go white as a sheet.

The author of the books has said, of including the scene in the movie, that "I'd love to have the birth scene be every bit as awful -- I know it freaked people out, but for those of us who have been through childbirth a couple times, it is a scary, terrifying experience. This is just taking that to an exponential power, and I love going there."

I guess if you frame childbirth in those terms, that's the sort of experience you might imagine. And since this movie is marketed so rabidly to teenagers, maybe it's not an awful thing (hey, if that's what works as birth control for them, more power to the movie).

But. With proper mental and physical preparation, a good support team, and a cooperative baby (not much you can do about preeclampsia or breech babies and other such complications) , you can do it! And it can actually be a positive experience....I've never experienced any feeling like my last push when my babies were born. It's accomplishment, relief, excitement, love, "let's conquer the world!", and beauty, all wrapped up. And I've probably missed something, because that doesn't even quite cover it. And it's phenomenal. In the Kantian sense of the word, sublime.

Not scary. Not inevitably deadly. Not uncontrollable.

Of course, this is coming from a girl who runs marathons for fun. But for what it's worth. Terror is not the only emotion we can or should associate with the prospect of experiencing childbirth.