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My Daily Domestic Diigolet 05/01/2008

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  • Ani DiFranco on ‘Club Sacrifice’ and her homebirth : Celebrity Baby BlogA powerful, frank and too assessment of birth and how the power of birth has been ripped from women in this country. A very graphic assessmenttags: birth, childbirth, homebirth, Ina, Mae, Gaskin, motherhood
    • Being a mom seems to have changed the way the world sees me more than the other way around. Being pregnant really shifts your relationship to society, and then walking around with a baby shifts it again.

      I love the feeling that I get from other parents — women in particular — of being a part of the club. Club Sacrifice, you might call it. It’s cool to have camaraderie, warmth, and openness with strangers. I wish that dynamic was more prevalent in general, but I am grateful to have it now.

    • I was in labor for 43 hours. Pushed for five hours. It was brutal and
      scary and prolonged, and if I was in a hospital, they would have
      definitely cut the baby out of me. I thank the goddesses that I was at
      home with patient midwives who knew how to go the distance. The memory
      of pain always recedes. The memory of triumph does not.
    • To take birthing out of women’s hands and deny us the continuum of
      eons of wisdom and experience is to eject us from the very seat of our
      power. I believe that women in hospitals are prevented from being able
      to have normal, healthy birthing experiences because of the
      intimidation of being on the clock, being pressured to take drugs to
      make it quicker, being inhibited in their movement and activities, and
      alienated by a sterile, fluorescent lit, feet-in-the-air type
      environment.

      You know the classic “performance anxiety” of not being able to pee
      or poo because somebody’s watching you? Multiply that by a million! A
      cervix is a sphincter after all!

      Then to add tragic insult to injury women are numbed through their
      great moment of revelation. I believe the act of giving birth to be the
      single most miraculous thing a human being can do and it is surely the
      moment when a lot of women finally understand the depth of their power
      and connection to all of nature. You think it can’t possibly be done,
      you think you can’t possibly take the pain, and then you do — and
      afterward you look at yourself in a whole new way. If you can do that,
      you can do anything.

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1 Comment

  1. I always loved Ani Difranco’s music, but it’s hard to look beyond one of her most powerful songs where she says, “walking towards the water with a fetus holding court in my gut,my body hijacked, my tits swollen and sore, the river has more colors at sunset than my sock drawer ever dreamed of, I could wake up screaming sometimes, but-I don’t. I could step off the end of this pier but I’ve got shit to do and an appointment on Tuesday to shed uninvited blood and tissue I said to the water, the son, the daughter, I thought better of–I could fall in love with Jersey at sunset–but I leave the view to the rats–and tiptoe back…”

    So I ask, if birth is the most powerful experience a woman can have–what is abortion? I suggest it’s a testament to a woman’s loss of all power. How will we women reclaim our power, beginning with the most fundamental power–giving birth–when so many of us insist that our power is rooted in sexual depravity and aborting our children? The disconnect, the dicotomy–is ignored–but at the root of our self-loathing and willingness to abandon our bodies and our babies to the business of medice.

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