Birth Center

My character Line has been interested in the birth process since her earliest days in high school when a friend allows her to be present when his sow farrows. Even then, she is impressed with the transcendent atmosphere in the barn where her friend has spent the night with the newborn pigs and their mother.

Women in the 1970’s were exploring all kinds of ways to take back power they felt they had abdicated. By this time Line has moved to Santa Cruz where her husband is getting a doctorate in history at the University of California. Of course, when she is pregnant, she finds the Santa Cruz Birth Center that Raven Lang and other courageous women began.

Raven Lang's Birth Book, 1972

Raven Lang was unhappy with birth as she experienced it at Stanford Hospital. In Raven’s case, the delivery room was “urgently needed,” so her doctor enlarged the episiotomy he had already done and in his haste cut through her anal sphincter. When she left the hospital she could not straighten up to walk or carry her own baby. She knew something had gone terribly wrong, though no one would tell her what. She questioned all hospital practices related to pregnancy, labor and delivery.

Raven began to provide classes in natural childbirth and attend local home births. Public health nurses pressured Raven to find out whether she was certified to teach as she did. She gathered together other women she knew who were teaching childbirth preparation and attending home births as midwives. They began to meet and share their education and experiences. They started the Birth Center which was entirely supported by the Santa Cruz community. They kept statistics on all of the births they monitored. Eventually they shared medical knowledge with others up and down the coast, becoming a kind of irregular school, and then the California Association of Midwives.

In March, 1974, Linda Bennett and Jeanine Walker were requested to assist in a home birth. They were entrapped by undercover agents (one of them pregnant) who confiscated their kit of birth tools, arrested both women and drove them to jail. At the same time officials from the DA’s office, the sheriff’s office, the state police converged on the Birth Center. Raven and Kate Coleman inside the center alerted radio stations and newspapers. Instead of violating laws about practicing without licenses, the women at the Birth Center believed the real issue was one of human rights.

This story is told in Immaculate Deception, by Suzanne Arms. I got the 1975 version from the library, because I am working with a 1970’s point of view. In this first version of the book, Suzanne, who also had a bad birthing experience in a hospital, does not mince words! “I realized an entire system of medical procedures and interferences had been established to treat normal birth as a risky, dangerous, painful and abnormal process in which pregnant women have no choice other than to submit graciously.”

As a result of women questioning the over-technologized procedures of hospital births and obstetricians’ care, birth practices began to change. When my sister gave birth in the mid 1980’s, she chose one of two midwives practicing in San Francisco. They assisted her in the natural process in birthing rooms provided at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco. Her husband was in attendance and her new baby was not taken away from her.

Birthing is a cultural, as well as a deeply personal event and there is now a wide array of choices. But it does sound as if many women are again trusting birth to technology. In 2011 the national percentage of cesarean sections was 32.8%. Dr. Martin Blaser in Missing Microbes questions whether babies who don’t come down the birth canal are getting the immunities they need. I doubt I need to tell you where my character Line’s proclivities lie.