1700 hours: Contractions minimal all afternoon, now starting up strong again. Anne was up and around again in the afternoon, as has been her habit since the stronger contractions started. They exhibit a rather predictable rhythym. Maybe culminating in birth tonight?

Dec 26, 1230 hours update … very strong contractions again last night and this morning, and then they fade. Anne reports contractions as strong as any she has had outside the final push stage … but the birth pangs then go minimal.

It is all making me appreciate the professionalism of the birth process. And why it simply had to be done. In a pre-modernist world, when men made livable wages (or worked in the fields toiling away) and women did not have to work outside the home to support the family, women could support women in the drawn out birth process. Time was not money then, and if it took days and days to have a baby, so be it. The women folk held each other up through the process while the men folk worked away.

It was community. Not “friends,” not “immediate family,” but true community. Cousins, cousins in law, distant cousins, distant inlaws, etc and etc. The village.

Not nowadays. Nowadays time is money, and no one, man or woman, can sit around holding a pregnant gal’s hand while she goes through a lengthy birth process. Community is lost. Women chose to go to work outside the home, and then, as the economy was rotted out from the inside by free trade and other such anti-nationalist doctrines, women simply had to work. Time became money for us all. We had no room for community anymore, we became urbanites, one and all. Cosmopolitans. No time for a drawn out labor, let us get that pregnant mom to the hospital and get that baby out with the efficiency of an industrial process. Who needs natural labor? Who needs natural childbirth? Put men in charge, and it is “lights, cameras, action!!!” Wrench that kid out, or cut that kid out, and get back to the business of business in America. (C-sections have gone through the roof in the past decades – the perfect planned delivery where every minute is minimized though assembly line efficiency.)

We are slower here at the Brown homestead. Much slower. And it is boring this man to death!!!

This entry was posted on Friday, December 26th, 2008 at 8:36 am and is filed under Natural delivery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.