The Silent Mother

Esoteric & Historical Gravidity & Parturition

On the Potentiality of a Fetus vs. the Realized Woman

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With eight states (so far) passing laws that effectively ban abortion, including some laws that criminally punish both women and doctors for having or performing an abortion, it is beyond time for us to stand up and speak out. Preaching to the choir is nice, but won’t make change. So, here I write for those who are opposed to abortion.

On Proper Terminology

**Note: I use the correct medical term fetus instead of baby, with good reason. When sperm meets egg, the cluster of cells is called a zygote. Then it becomes an embryo. It remains an embryo till week 11 (date from last menstrual period). Afterwards, it becomes a fetus. It is a fetus until it is born and a valve in its heart closes so it can circulate oxygen through the lungs as opposed to receiving it through the umbilical cord. The physiology of a fetus is not the same as a baby after birth.

Pro-Life Beliefs, or Valuing the Fetus over the Woman

The pro-life belief presumes to value the life of the fetus and in doing so, determines that abortion is taking a life. In that, the belief is that taking a life is morally wrong and therefore abortion should not be an option for pregnant people.

Fundamentally, this belief values the life of the embryo or fetus over that of the woman. It values the potentiality of that life over the realized life of the woman. It values a maybe over what is.

I had a social media discussion, in the context of the abortion debate, with a man this week in which he said that he values the lives of both his wife and his children equally. Yet, what he could not see is that those are realized children, not potential children. When I mentioned a litany of pregnancy complications, including stroke, hemorrhage and death that a woman may suffer, he still insisted that the life of the fetus was valued as much as that of the woman so the woman should take the risk of pregnancy… yet, he values his wife? Do you see the problem here? This is him valuing the fetus over the mother, unarguably.

The pro-life beliefs are not that they value the life of the fetus and the woman equally, though they say that often. The pro-life beliefs value the fetus over the mother, no matter the cost to the pregnant person. The costs to her are physical, emotional, economic, social, relational, and temporal. When we value a fetus, an unrealized potentiality, over a fully realized woman, we place her status as second class. She is demoted.

Anti-Abortion Feminists?

To those who claim to be feminists and anti-abortion, you find yourselves in a paradoxical state. Feminism is equality for all genders in all matters
physical, emotional, economic, social, relational, and temporal. By demoting a woman’s value to below that of an unrealized potential you have stripped her of her equality. You can not claim to be a feminist while decreasing a woman’s value at the same time.

The Question of Bodily Autonomy

Ok, so what about the question of bodily autonomy? A zygote, embryo and fetus are only sustained because of the woman’s body. Without the woman’s uterus the fetus has no nutrients, oxygen, water or anything else it needs to grow and develop. If you remove it from the uterus it is incompatible with life. As such, its body is not in any way separate from the woman’s body. It shares blood circulation through the placenta. The woman’s heart beats therefore so does the fetus’s. If the woman dies, her heart stops, so does that of the fetus. Given that, the fetus is thus part of a woman’s body and therefore is under her dominion. The realized woman has autonomy. The potentiality of a fetus does not.

Autonomy also assumes the ability to make decisions about one’s own body. A fetus has no decision making capability. A newborn baby, 2 weeks old, has no decision making capability. All decisions for and about the baby are made by its parent(s). Neither the fetus nor the baby have autonomy. They are incapable of such a thing. They have no ability to govern their body of their beliefs. A realized person does. The pregnant person, being realized, has autonomy. Therefore, the decision as to how she handles her body and everything contained within is solely up to her.

The pregnant woman is stripped of her human rights and of her autonomy by anti-abortion legislation. By valuing a fetus, a potentiality, over the reality of a woman it thus demotes her to below the level of men do who have full dominion over their bodies. She and her body are put under the control of the state.

The issue has never been about fetus’s lives or the question thereof. If you believe that you have fallen for a red herring. The issue, is and always will be, controlling women and their bodies. Pro-life isn’t pro-life. It is pro-birth, pro-control and pro-women-as-second-class-citizens.

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Where do we go from here? Implications for modern childbirth education. Part 12

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The interconnectedness of faith and medicine, as illustrated with the case of Dr. Grantly Dick-Read, offers us a new perspective when tackling ethical issues where faith and medicine seems to collide. When physicians can have the understanding that patients can, consciously or otherwise, regard them in a parallel status to that of a priest, with their words and suggestions as gospel truth on their health and well being, it may help physicians to communicate with patients in a new way that is more conducive to collaborative care.

By Edwardx – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38918671

This knowledge can also help medical providers better reach patients with dogmatic beliefs against standard of care treatments, such as childhood vaccinations or other arenas where patients values and beliefs may lead them to cause harm to self or to others.

Yet, I caution about this because there are other areas in medicine where doctor knows best, does not apply. The case of a physician refusing to offer birth control or abortion rises to the top of my list of where physician beliefs and faith in their own rightness can interfere negatively with patient care.

More broadly, this pushes out into politics and legislation. When issues like this are seen as an “either / or”, rather than an “and”, then one side is “right”, rather than having a deeper understanding of the nuance and complexity of the issues. When an issue is seen as two boxers in a ring, one will always need to come out as a clear winner. Rather, when, as suggested by Levin, Vanderpool, Mann and Messikomer, we see the integration of faith and medicine, faith can become a powerful tool to motives patients to act.

If the broader avenues of scholarship, religious studies, anthropology, sociology, law, public health, medicine, etc. can widen their perspectives and work in an interdisciplinary manner, then, I propose, we may see a new paradigm for research in the field.

After doing this research, I am left with more questions that I am as of yet, unable to answer. As a childbirth educator and doula, I see my own teachings reflected back in Read’s words and method, and yet, I am dismayed and left wondering, knowing the history of eugenics, the desire to control women’s bodies and their childbearing ability and the foundations of modern childbirth education in this concept of the noble savage and the overcivilized woman, how can we childbirth educators teach in good conscience?

Are the positive outcomes regarding happy parents and satisfied consumers of our classes, enough to keep teaching as we do?

To use a colloquial term, now that we are “woke” because the evidence shows the roots of Read’s method to be buried in the idea of white racial superiority and the continuation of the race, how do we move forward?

Knowing that Read was, in effect, an anti-science doctor, how do we still teach his techniques and theory?

Are the results worth the little lie we tell ourselves and our students? Is it a little lie after all or is faith alone what women need to preserver through a potentially long and painful experience?

Is is that faith in themselves, in the work they did to prepare for birth and faith in their medical providers enough?

Is childbirth education effective not because of what we teach, but because of how we teach it?

Fundamentally, Read’s encouragement and direct support of women, whether at the bedside or through his book, gave women the faith they needed to shirk unnecessary medical interventions and have births that were predominantly physiologically normal, with limited medical interventions. The seeds he planted and germinated grew to be an international movement promoting natural childbirth which still thrives today, though with the same controversies as when it originated.

Fin.

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A Calling – Parallels Between Clergy and Physicians, Part 9

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The similarities between how Read, and physicians in general, interact with and are perceived by patients and clergy and their interactions with believers of the faith are notable. Levin says that “physicians have been compared to a secular priesthood.”[1] This I find to be true in the case of Read in the way he positions himself as a prophet, preaching his “gospel of natural childbirth”. Read’s patients, the mothers, seek him out for his guidance and his unwavering faith in his method and in the idea of painless childbirth. The repetition and the allegorical storytelling Read uses to engage his readers and listeners mimics that of a preacher or priest on the pulpit.

Raphael, St Paul Preaching in Athens

Louw, in a commentary on preaching says, “Words and communication are attempts to transcend the immediacy of the experience – its aim is to take human life further than merely the phenomenology of facts and observation of mundane entities. Its aim is to give language and vocabulary to life events and spiritual experiences.”[2] Birth is therefore viewed as a life event that is both medical and spiritual.

This association between medical and spiritual can be seen in Messikomer’s ethnographic study on the spirituality of modern physicians. She found that her sample group all agreed that their desire to become physicians was a calling, not unlike a calling to the ministry.[3] One of her subjects stated, “Apart from being called to ministry, I think it’s (medicine) the highest calling.”[4] It becomes the highest calling one can have because of the duty to serve, protect and heal the sick. Though Messikomer doesn’t use the term moral theology I will choose to use it in the context of physicians and their practice. Given that physicians tackle the issues of pain, suffering, accidents, depression, anxiety, birth and death, and religion does the same then physicians are practicing a variant of moral theology.

This goes beyond the traditional definition of the term relating to Christian ethics. We can look at moral theology through the broader perspective of decision making which is relative not only to one’s own actions and how that relates to God or to any one specific religious doctrine. Moral theology can be applied to any religion, philosophy or model of behaviors. In this case, with physicians relating their calling to medicine as to that of the ministry, and with physicians having to adhere to specific codes of ethics such as: the Hippocratic Oath, HIPPA regulations, privacy guidelines, informed consent rules, and so on, they are provided with a moral framework within which they must work. This moral framework for physicians mirrors that of organized religion.  Authority from on high, within a hierarchical structure, creates and enforces these moral and ethical guidelines for physicians.

Vanderpool suggests that “religious and medical professionals rely upon certain common dynamics”.[5] He lists six shared functions between faith and medicine: postulating, prescribing and proscribing, establishing, alleviating, managing and enhancing and that each of these reflects both religion and medicine.[6] These shared axioms regard the interplay between body and mind, the meaning of suffering, sexuality, death, strives to understand or manipulate the body and mind, and define personhood.[7] These six shared functions allow for a mapping of faith based, or religious thinking and ritual to be replaced, in part, with medical thinking and ritual.

Vanderpool states, “Religious beliefs thus sustain and shape the practice of medicine, whether or not religion is overtly recognized or practiced within medical institutions.”[8] This is especially recognizable when it comes to the nature and care of a gravid woman. Her beliefs will influence everything from whether she chooses to give birth in a hospital, a free-standing birth center or at home. Her faith in the process, herself and her care providers will inform her sense of safety when making the choice as to where she births and with whom. This is the intangible aspect of pregnancy and birth which Read so successfully tapped into with the mothers who held him in reverence. Vanderpool notes that, “religion and medicine are widely used as ethical gatekeepers for the daily decisions of ordinary persons. In concert with law, religion and medicine specific normative and deviant action for many areas of human life.”[9]

Ethics are moral principles which provide guidance in how people are to live and interact. Religion and medicine both have a framework of ethical precepts and behaviors. Both attempt to define a universal truth about life and how things function. Wardlaw claims that, “science was a particularly appealing tool for an intellectual climate that focused on a search for universalizable truths, and medicine was the ideal conduit for the application of these truths to the human body.”[10] She says that “medical thinking began to function religiously.”[11] Like Vanderpool and Levin, Wardlaw sees doctors as a new type of priesthood, she uses Foucault’s term, “therapeutic clergy.” This is an apt way to describe both Read and his method. Like those entering the clergy, Read felt a calling for medicine. This calling, along with Read’s revelation of natural childbirth and preacher-like style embody this idea of the inseparability of faith and medicine. He, whether intentionally or not, set himself up as a leader of a movement among women, akin to a new religious movement in is fervency and dogmatic structure.

Next up: Rethinking Faith vs. Medicine to become, Faith and Medicine

[1] Levin, J. (2018), The discourse on faith and medicine, a tale of two literatures, p. 275

[2] Louw, D. (2016), Preaching as art (imaging the unseen) and art as homiletics (verbalizing the unseen): Towards the aesthetics if iconic thinking and poetic communication in homiletics, p. 2

[3] Messikomer, C. (2002), The Spirituality of Academic Physicians: An Ethnography of a Scripture-based Group in an Academic Medical Center, p. 562

[4] Messikomer, C. (2002), The Spirituality of Academic Physicians: An Ethnography of a Scripture-based Group in an Academic Medical Center, p. 572

[5] Vanderpool H.Y. and Levine J.S. (1990), Religion and Medicine, how are they related? p. 10-11

[6] Vanderpool H.Y. and Levine J.S. (1990), Religion and Medicine, how are they related? p. 14

[7] Vanderpool H.Y. and Levine J.S. (1990), Religion and Medicine, how are they related? p. 11-12

[8] Vanderpool H.Y. and Levine J.S. (1990), Religion and Medicine, how are they related? p. 12

[9] Vanderpool, H.Y. and Levine J.S. (1990), Religion and Medicine, how are they related? p. 12-13

[10] Wardlaw, M. P., (2010), America medicine as religious practice: care of sick as a sacred obligation and the decent into secularization, p 64

[11] ibid

Bibliography, Deena Blumenfeld, The Silent Mother, Dr. Grantly Dick-ReadDownload
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