Ways of Women: Birthing Babies

Barbara Lewis
Dec 29, 2018
11 min read

I met our first child feet first. I touched Laura’s tiny toes before seeing her. A surprise breech baby, she arrived in a rush. Our doctor didn’t even have time to change into his doctorly whites. As I was lifted by my shoulders and feet onto a stretcher to be wheeled into the delivery room, I braced myself to be lowered onto the cot and Laura’s feet fell onto my hand. Imagine my surprise! Plop! Plop! The touch of her skin was electric. Breaking with a timeless tradition of giving birth in delineated phases, Laura emerged without my pushing. She slipped out like a sigh. The nurses cleaned and bundled her up like a gift for me but I’d already met my little firecracker daughter with her soft toes and curly red hair, born on the Fourth-of-July.

Deliveries are like fingerprints; no two are exactly alike. Each of my three deliveries differed significantly one from another. But all had the same outcome—a beautiful, healthy baby entered the world. I remember each of the deliveries. I’ve forgotten most of the details of the last forty-one years of motherhood, but the births of my babies are stored safely in the motherhood vault.

Birthing babies has been on my mind lately because Laura expects her third child to grace our presence within the next two months. Like many women these days, Laura has given birth to her children while in her late thirties. Medical people refer to women who are pregnant at age 35 or older as “advanced maternal age.” Despite the discomfort that some women might feel at hearing themselves described this way, the implications of the term hold true. Some complications are more likely when mothers are older—such as gestational diabetes or high blood pressure. Having babies later in life puts a strain on the body. It’s harder to be pregnant when you’re forty-one. Now that she’s in her seventh month, Laura’s struggling to be perky around her two young children who are still babies in their own right at age two and four years. Each morning, John Nathaniel and Annabelle greet the day with great energy and enthusiasm, wondering what terrifically exciting events the day might hold for them. But there are days when Laura’s ready to go back to bed after breakfast. She really shouldn’t lift them anymore. She often squats to relieve the pressure on her stomach and back. The last time I was at her house, she said, “Mom, can you believe I’ll have seven more weeks of this?”

Most women throughout history spent much of their lives pregnant or nursing. The physical hardships of childbearing shaped their lives. The typical mother gave birth to between five and eight children. The risk to her life increased with the number of pregnancies.

When my daughter, Heather, was expecting our first grandchild, I flew across the country to Hilton Head, North Carolina to await Aine’s birth. I was able to accompany Heather and her husband, Ian, to the last ultrasound. At first, everything looked jumbled and opaque on the small monitor and then the figure of a baby twisted into view. Then to my surprise and delight, a petite, perfect foot presented itself to the screen. Aine's foot startled me. The shape of her sole was so clear and pronounced that I almost reached out to touch it. A few weeks later, I held that small foot in the palm of my hand. The long narrow arch and tiny curled toes felt miraculous to me—the flesh-of-my-flesh that was like no other, including myself. I knew that foot would take Aine places. So far, it’s taken her to her future on a farm in Vermont at age six, stalking the chickens and goats with her feet unshod.

Advances in modern medicine have made delivering babies easier for mothers than in the past, but even in this day and age, the medical community can slip up. My daughter, Heather, faced gestational diabetes, and her midwife guided her toward an uncomplicated delivery, but when Laura’s first child, John Nathaniel, hit the scene two years later, he arrived weighing almost twelve pounds—an absurd weight for a newborn and possibly the result of undiagnosed gestational diabetes. Laura underwent a C-section and John Nathaniel needed to be hospitalized for a few days. For the birth of her second child, Annabelle, Laura recieved insulin, which helped to regulate her sugar and the baby’s weight. The delivery went much smoother, and no C-section was needed. Now we are awaiting the third baby, aware of the range of possibilities.

Mothers keep having babies in spite of the risks. American women in previous centuries wrote candid letters to loved ones about the trials of repeated childbirth. Mathilde Shillock, a German immigrant to Minnesota, wrote of an impending birth that the “three years of western life have so thoroughly exhausted me that I am no longer capable of joy or hope or love.” As recorded in Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750 to 1950, Hannah Whitall Smith wrote in her diary in 1852 that a recent birth “nearly killed me” and that she “lay at the point of death…I am very unhappy now…This is the end of my hopes, my pleasing anticipations, my returning youthful joyousness.” Even so, she was determined to accept her fate. “Well, it is a woman’s lot and I must try to become resigned and bear it in patience and silence and not make my home unhappy because I am so. But, oh, how hard it is.”

When I talk to Laura about these women, she says: “Most women I know in Seattle would never put themselves in such a dire situation. They wouldn’t take that kind of risk. If you sent them back to the pioneer days, there wouldn’t be any more children!”

I can’t speak for Seattle women today, but when I was a young wife, I didn’t weigh the difficulties of childbirth before becoming pregnant. I was naive about the inherent dangers. None of my close friends had children. I had never held a newborn. I plunged into motherhood heedless of the possibility of catastrophe. If troubles arose, I trusted that God and a modern, medical team would save me.

Laura lives in Seattle, a city known for excellent doctors, but even so, she had a difficult first delivery and subsequent recovery. A week after coming home, she developed a kidney infection. That afternoon, I knew something was terribly wrong when Laura grew pale and listless. I couldn’t get her to drink water from a straw. But since she’d just come into the house from seeing the midwife, who’d assured Laura that she was simply exhausted, I figured I’d give her a few moments to rest before insisting that she go to the emergency room.

I sat on a chair beside her bed and waited. I tried to pray but when that didn’t ease my distress, I did something I’ve never done before, never heard about doing. I imagined my female relatives sitting there with me—those I had known like my mother and maternal grandmother, but also two of my great-grandmothers who I knew only through photographs. I felt the tangible presence of these women like you might feel if someone sat beside you while your eyes were shut. I don’t know how long we waited there in that small room. A few moments of strong stillness can feel outside of time. But when we were done, Laura rose from the bed, having come to the same conclusion as I had. Time to go! Her husband, Chris, quickly ushered her to the car. Soon after she was admitted to the emergency room, Laura was on her way to recovery.

What occurred with Laura’s pregnancy, delivery, and later illness, played out in a modern-day city with state-of-the-art medical care in the year 2014. What if she’d been living in the backwoods of the Shenandoah Valley in the year 1759? If I had delivered my first baby in eighteenth-century Virginia, I’m doubtful that I would have survived to have another child. On top of breech birth, I had to contend with pre-eclampsia and after-birth hemorrhaging. Given the experiences within our own small family, it’s a wonder so many women in colonial times survived.

A pregnant woman back then faced terrible odds. During her lifetime, her chances of dying in childbirth ran as high as one in eight. If a woman had eight female friends, at least one of them was likely to die in childbirth. Mothers died from exhaustion, dehydration, infection, hemorrhage, and convulsions. Death in childbirth was so common that many women regarded pregnancy with dread. Judith Walzer Leavitt writes, “Many women walked…under the shadow of maternity, experiencing repeated and agonizing births in unrelenting succession with no relief throughout their fertile years.”

To face the dangers inherent in childbirth, women relied on other women. Other mothers knew the courage it took to bring life into the world. Women often developed a special closeness after helping another woman give birth. These women served together as a band of sisters. The joy of delivering a healthy baby to a healthy mother was deeper when shared. Sometimes the baby or mother died. Surviving a trauma together made the crises bearable. The bonds that formed between women during these shared experiences strengthened friendships that were needed to sustain other parts of a woman’s life.

Women went to considerable sacrifice to assist their friends and relatives, interrupting their busy lives to travel long distances, frequently staying months before and after delivery to help with the new baby and household chores. While some young mothers delivered at their parents’ house, the typical woman gave birth to her children at home while female kin and neighbors clustered at her bedside. Expectant mothers often preselected the women they wanted to attend them at the birth of a child. A whole slew of women might help with the birth—friends and neighbors and kin. When no relative was available, neighbors stayed for the labor and delivery and brought food to the family and kept up with the washing and other household duties.

The historian, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, quotes one midwifery manual: “There is a tender regard one woman bears to another…and a natural sympathy in those that have gone thro’ the Pangs of Childbearing; which, doubtless, occasion a compassion for those that labour under these circumstances, which no man can be a judge of.”

But men did judge. Most took for granted that women should have babies despite the pains and risks associated with childbirth. “That Women generally endure pain and sickness with more fortitude and patience than men, is evident,” the physician John Gunn wrote in 1861. “Looking forward with the pleasing hope of being the mother of a tender offspring, upon which she can lavish her affection and tenderness, sustains her in fulfilling the conditional requirements of Nature. Few men could be induced, for any consideration, to suffer in a similar manner.”

Mothers relied on other women to help them cope. Female friends and relatives served as assistants, helping the mother to recline, crouch, kneel, or deliver upright as she pushed down to bear the child. The transition from the early stages of labor to the later stages—perhaps cued by dilation—was marked by calling these favored women into the birthing room.

Midwives attended births whenever possible. Throughout the colonies (and subsequent states) skilled midwives were highly valued. Serving alongside other female attendants, they waited patiently for nature to take its course, providing comfort and physical nourishment to the mother throughout labor and delivery. Some communities tried to attract experienced midwives by offering a salary or rent-free housing, but most midwives were local women who had learned midwifery by apprenticing. Observing and helping with deliveries honed their skills and exposed them to the variety of problems they would face when working on their own. Midwives might be given modest compensation, receiving a chicken or some household goods as payment. Sometimes the midwife and the women who helped with the birth slept together in a cluster of beds in the kitchen or a spare bedchamber. After delivery, new mothers were often treated to a banquet along with their attendants. At one such event, visitors feasted on boiled pork, fowls, roast beef, turkey pie, and tarts.

After a successful birth, came the lying-in period which began with the departure of most of the attendants and the midwife. The term “lying-in” is certainly a misnomer since most women spent little time in bed. While women from well-to-do families might spend three to four weeks in bed convalescing, those from poorer families were generally back at work in one or two days. Most women spent a week in their bedchamber. “It wasn’t the size and position of the women’s uterus but her ability to make her own bed that signified recovery,” writes Ulrich.

Newly delivered mothers suffered afterpains, hemorrhoids, and phlebitis. They experienced sore breasts, fevers, colds, fits from eclampsia, severe headaches, weakness, and uterine cramps up to a month after delivery. Women sometimes died of infections caused by bacterial invasion of the uterine cavity. If a mother grew ill, neighbors and kin came to suckle the newborn. Few women sent their infants out to be suckled. Only a severe illness of the mother could justify separating mother and child.

In addition to concerns about her own welfare, an expectant mother worried about her newborn child. Children died from smallpox, scarlet fever, measles, or dysentery. The chances of a child dying before his fifth birthday were around twenty percent.

Despite the risks of pregnancy and childbirth and the worries over the health of their children, most women chose marriage and motherhood—and opted to run a household. They succeeded because women existed within a network of other women with whom they shared close ties, due in large part to shared work experiences and repeated birth experiences.

The close ties between family members and other women in the neighborhood helped to preserve and sustain my ancestors. This is how they survived. This is how they thrived. Women worked together with other women spinning and weaving, cooking and preserving food, planting and harvesting, making tallow candles and boiling lard for soap. They helped one another to birth babies and bring up children.

I love the idea of a rich network of female friends enabling my kin to survive and thrive. Not only must I thank my female ancestors, but I should include their girlfriends and any extended familial relationships in my gratitude. I had the picture wrong in my head all these years. Pioneer women weren’t necessarily alone on their remote farms. They didn’t have to spend their lives isolated in small cabins waiting for their husbands to come home from the fields. They remained tied to an extended community of women throughout their lives. They often brought their babies into the world surrounded by the love and care of family and friends. I hope my grandchildren will tend these same fires.

I want my granddaughters to develop and keep friendships with other women. I want my grandsons to partner with women who have been nurtured by strong, resourceful women. During my generation, the focus has been on equal rights for women, but I wonder now if the importance of relationships between women has become deemphasized along the way. Let’s not forget how women have survived until now. Our gift to the future is to remember what worked in the past and hold onto what’s important—to what’s crucial for both women and men.

My grandchildren will walk into the future without me. That’s the plan, isn’t it? Every grandparent hopes they’ll be outrun—that their grandkids will outdistance them and zip far ahead. Even so, I hope that my grandchildren will carry a part of me with them, just as I carry my forebears with me.

The long reach of the past goes through me now. I hope I can be a good conduit. I hope I can pass along some ancestral resolve, some kindness coupled with spit-and-vigor and a certain solidness of self, and of course, the crucial importance of family and friends.

The ways of women? To remember, remind, and preserve—so that our children and grandchildren can keep and repeat the best of the past.

This is what I keep learning as I research my ancestors: Since the beginning of time, it’s been one long, collective love letter—to the present and future, to you, to us, to those, like my almost-here grandson, who are waiting to come into the world.

Seven weeks and counting!