In 2020, the novel of the American writer and journalist Anna Norz Outlawed ("outlaw") about the daughter of the midwife, which at the end of the nineteenth century is forced to flee to the wildest West and is trying to prove to everyone that childless women are not the witch.
In the essay to edition The Guardian, the writer told about how her perception of the theme of childbear changed after she herself became her mother. We publish the translation of this text.
The birth of a child in the nineteenth century was a rather risky business. Many women have fallen with postpartum fever - the infection of the uterus, which could lead to sepsis and death. Others could suffer greatly from abundant bleeding during childbirth, which also claimed the lives of many birthdayrs.
Some had to test the eclampsia - a condition in which the sharp increase in blood pressure could cause fetal convulsions. In 1900, six-nine women were died of six or nine women (and this is 30 times more than at present) from a thousand years of giving birth during childbirth or immediately after their completion.
I learned all these facts when I began to collect material for my novel "Outlaw" (Outlawed) - in it I tell the story of the daughter of the midwife, which in 1894 fled through the American West. I needed to figure out how obstetrics and gynecology of that time were arranged.
At first I read about the history of Cesarean section - operations, which up to the 1880s in Europe led to a fatal outcome, although they began to do it in the second century of our era.
I learned about how in the 1670s the existence of eggs was opened and the Dr. Rainer de Graph argued about them (who demonstrated their existence, opening rabbits shortly after mating) and his rival Yang Swamertam (who loved to travel with the human uterus and Other "objects of genital anatomy").
I studied the composition of the first mixtures for babies, which in Europe in the sixteenth-seventeenth century often consisted of a bread-soaked bread, and fed babies from special rowels (which, unfortunately, it was difficult to launder, and therefore many bacteria accumulated there).
Most of this information was fascinating for me. From some facts, of course, redesigned, but in general I can not say that something had a strong emotional impact on me. Possessing all this material, I started writing a story about multi-day childbirth, bloody episiotomy, the death of guefings and stillbirth, and, although I tried to write with Empathy towards women who were forced to survive all this, this process did not destabilize me, and I continued Normally sleep. I wrote about their experience in the same way as writers write about the experience of other people who did not have to survive themselves: putting into the text, but not identifying themselves with the characters.
And then I had a child.
We were lucky with the son - both on the standards of the nineteenth century, and according to modern standards. The level of maternal mortality and mortality of newborn, though decreased since 1900, but these tragedies happen today. And a lot of fencers are still forced to pass the painful procedure of episiotomy or face other postpartum complications, for recovery after which they will have to spend months or years.
I was lucky - my pregnancy and childbirth were sensitive, and, like a white woman, I did not have to face institutional racism, due to which the death rate of African American women during childbirth remains so high. Although I have some questions about what society expects from women after childbirth (what? So that they quickly returned to the "normal" state as soon as possible!) In general, the birth of a child has not become a traumatic event for me.
But I could no longer look at my book as before.
I almost finished the first version when my son was born. For the rest of chapter I had to spend many months. Then the editing time has come.
I could with great difficulty to re-read the passage, in which the mother of heroine, the famous local midwife, is preparing for his own childbirth, remembering his last patient who died during battles. It was even harder to read mention of infants who died shortly after birth.
Throughout its pregnancy and even early stage, I remained supernaturally calm - apparently, some hormones suppressed my anxiety with which I lived with decades. But as soon as my son was born, I acutely realized that during the childbirth it could not go so that it went wrong.
The realities of the medicine of the nineteenth century, which once seemed dry facts, suddenly became completely unbearable for understanding.
We can say, I am glad that I almost finished the book before my own child appeared. If I had to write about the work of the midwife after the birth of a son, I may have any temptation to embellish the danger of that time. No matter how hard it was to reread these pages again, I still did not cut them.
My worldview has changed a lot since I wrote a draft version of the novel. Now I am much more angry. I evil on how obsession people talk about the importance of continuing the genus and how they reduce women to the functions of childbearing. If the kids doctors look many times after birth, then the women after childbirth are the first time go to the doctor again six weeks! Although they at this time may have experienced the most traumatic event of their lives.
This public obsession with female ability to reproduce is hard and fruitless women, and women who have decided not to give birth to children in ideological reasons.
For many years I have covered themes associated with reproductive health as a journalist, so I know about all these stereotypes do not first. But I felt them on myself when my pregnancy became apparent to others - my personality was worse, but all the attention was attracted to the fetus.
But motherhood made me not only violent. Now I understand how society in an idea should have referred to those who want to have children. In one of the parts of my book, written after the birth of the Son, I describe the center in which pregnant and women come who would like to make an abortion, and those women who cannot understand why they can't get pregnant. This is a bright and clean place. There are pillows for childbirth. Here every woman has space to walk during battles.
But the most important thing is that people who speak with women and who have a matter of them, and not only before their children.
I started working on a novel with an intellectual understanding of what childbirth is. And finished - with an intuitive understanding. I began to write this book because I wanted to figure out what fertility, infertility, and how reproductive pressure on women arises. And at the end I wanted to imagine what this world should have been - or at least one space - in which people passing through pregnancy, childbirth and reproductive difficulties - could get that care that they deserve.
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