So this was super helpful for me to read. In 2011 when I was pregnant with my first and choosing midwifes, I read a few of Gaskin's books and I was taken in - I was hungry for something to tell me "you can do this." I do remember the one thing that gave me pause was where she said you could just choose during childbirth to "be like a monkey" and that monkeys have no pain in birth - I remember thinking, ok, but their bodies and brains are somewhat different than mine. When I had an emergency c-section after getting to full un-medicated dilatation because the baby was "sunnyside up" I really did think for a long time it was because I had not "let go enough" or had ended up having fear. Reading this post so much clicked about what didn't feel right in those books at the time.
LAURA! I don't think I realized you were here lol. Thank you for sharing this, and I'm so glad this article resonated and gave some perspective that is maybe helpful.
You have written and pulled together threads I have also been tracking in my own way and I'm so grateful!
I have recently started calling myself a "recovering hippie." I am going on 20 years now of evolution from many years idealizing but at the same time skeptical of the hippies/homesteaders I made life amongst from my mid 20s to mid 30s. I'd never heard of home birth until I read Ina May's Guild to Childbirth when I got pregnant for the first time in 2006. I embraced it all- home birth, baby wearing, no vaccines, raw milk, making herbal medicine, growing food, etc etc etc. And I did it all in a small island full of white folks like me - classic hippies running away to try to create a utopia- that is made possible by Seattle adjacent microsoft, boeing kind of company, and folks now with small businesses built off generational privilege and cultural theft- no native people remain on the island. But I digress..... Luckily my social justice roots of my southern family came through and I got off the island to pursue a masters in anti-racist education; and later retrained as a doula - taking very different trainings- one from a black childbirth educator and one from a white hippie midwife (whose work is deeply problematic, but I had plans of writing a comparison piece between the trainings as an educational piece but never came to pass). All this was happening too as covid19 revealed who believed in public health and who believed in white exceptionalism. Thus the hippie to alt right pipeline revealed itself to me...
I recently read The Guardian piece on FBS so I'm glad you wove that in. As absolutely they are all connected. The other term that came to mind about The Farm is "regressive nostalgia;" which we are seeing now with this insane obsession with raw milk and beef tallow that the MAHA/MAGA sect idealizes. I see SO many other movements connected to this.... there's an academic on Substack who wrote a piece about clothing designer/rural dweller/homebirth mom Julie O'Rourke (Rudy Jude) who was seen at an RFK jr event, but also stylistically plays into this trope about regressive nostalgia i.e. a kind of purity culture if you will- and how this feeds into this certain California "natural" mom aesthetic that is so popular (sounds like hippies to me). No matter the style you favor it seems white supremacy is there- whether you want a cookie cutter home in a gated community near a mall church or you want a hand built home in rural Maine- white supremacy.
I think the point about whose elder is key here. I can only speak for myself as a white woman with no true culture to claim that because of this white people take it so personally when some hero they've invested in is toppled- like Ina May. Our cultural impoverishment fuels cultural theft. I do see some people doing good work around this but it sure seems rare and slow.
Anyways- really really appreciate you writing this and putting all these things together. I emailed this off to a couple birth work friends.
This piece is truly brilliant and necessary. THANK YOU. I didn't yet know much of this history (namely, about the Farm), so it was very informative. As someone who's long been interested in birth doula training and works as a spiritual care provider, I've seen Gaskin's work pop up a bunch in my searches, especially the Spiritual Midwifery book. I nearly bought it despite feeling uneasy about it, until I saw a review that featured a page from inside titled "Advice for Mother at the Time of Birth". Her guidance utterly horrified me:
- "At a birthing, the mother is the main channel of life force. If she is cooperative and selfless and brave, it makes there be more energy for everyone." Gaskin then says the birthing person needs to give some of that life force energy to the midwife, husband, and other people present, since the baby isn't out of the womb to cuddle with yet. The birthing person is thus not only responsible for birthing a child, but also responsible for managing + supplying everyone else's energy and cooperating with *their* energy needs (rather than prioritizing one's own in such an intense moment)... !?!??!?!??!
- "Don't complain, it makes things worse. If you usually complain, practice not doing it in pregnancy. It will build character." WUT. IS. THIS. TOXIC. POSITIVITY?
- "Talk nice. [When you ask your midwife/husband for something], ask real nice and give folks some when they give something for you." What is this ~be a good docile wife~ BS doing in a list of recs for birthers at the most intense moment of their lives, when they must also supposedly "surrender" to whatever is flowing through them? Wouldn't surrender also include emotions and expressions that are decidedly "not nice"?
Of course, the lingo was entirely cis-heteronormative, which I anticipated, but the onerous emphasis on making the husband happy even during birth was WILD.
And, as you wrote about, I did a triple-take when I read her bio on the back cover of her guide to childbirth, which legit stated she learned the "Gaskin maneuver" from indigenous midwives in Guatemala. Like... that makes it decisively ~not~ the "Gaskin" maneuver.
I've long cringed at the thought that she's been so instrumental to the midwifery industry. Thanks again for putting even better words to these impressions than I had before.
I almost cited that exact passage!! But the article was already long enough without me doing a close reading about my very objection about her books lol
Wow. Lots of very interesting history. Wrapped in woke grievance mongering, that makes the reading an ordeal.
A white hippie helping the births of white hippies used white people illustrations! Oh no, how nasty of her. And she "stole" an indigenous maneuver that was freely shared with her and she shared it with the medical community. What a horrible thief! And you know.... to say "birthing mothers" would be transphobic, eh... whereas erasing born women from language is oh so au courant? Gadzooks...
I’ve told you this but what you’ve written about pain and labor stayed with me during contractions. I kept thinking “this is horrible. I hate this. Pain is a part of life and I’m not trying to erase the painful parts of life or birth.” I gave birth without an epidural to a big-ish OP baby and had zero spiritual epiphanies throughout (I also can imagine nothing more obnoxious than being asked questions while in labor). Afterward it felt really powerful to me that I think it was my first experience ever of being in pain and not trying to pretend I wasn’t. You helped lay the foundation for that and if I had surrounded myself with Ina May-type birth workers I think I would have had to work through a lot of shame afterward of being loud and of feeling miserable.
Thank you for connecting these threads so clearly. It seems so cool and so obvious to me that you’re out here doing things/justice-/birth- work and know the larger threads you’re a part of and are secure in that and wow is the contrast obvious with the commenters who get funny feelings when they read their work and don’t know why.
Loved reading this - I also had a big OP baby, unmedicated, loud, and no epiphanies. (I think the birth was transformational in other ways, tho.) Robina's advice also helped me! SO, twinsies.
I volunteer as a doula now, and nurses do complain about loud birthers. So that fear isn't just internalized, it's a real one! I'm glad I was at home and had midwives who encouraged the loudness.
I really appreciated your original IG post, and (while I'm sorry it may have been sparked by people's ignorant feedback) I was very moved by your expanding on it here. Thank you as always for so generously sharing your amazing scholarship, and wise reflections tying it all together.
Oh it was fine! I should have said, by and large, people seemed to take that post in the spirit it was intended, so in that regard I was happy to have posted it. It seemed to reassure a lot of people or relieve some self blame, which is always my goal. I maybe should write a more in-depth post about this! Thank you for commenting.
A wonderful read! Over the years, I've heard about people's birth experiences at the "Farm" and saw Gaskin's book in midwifery reading lists, but never looked much deeper into her after I learned about her response to Tasha Portley's question. I appreciate more information about her being shared within the context of racist systems actively dismantling traditional, cultural midwifery ways of caring for birthgivers.
A few lines I appreciated most:
"...I think we owe it to ourselves and our sense of possibility to dig deeper about the narratives we inherit, to look at what and who is left out, and what work is to be done in those absences To live in the uncomfortable truths and contradictions that birth so beautifully lays bear rather than simply accept the easy and comfortable stories."
"In so doing she appealed for legitimacy from the very forces she herself had distinguished herself from — the medical industrial complex — by transforming an oral and sacred tradition into one that passed the test of “evidence based medicine.” Those midwives were illiterate, she was careful to emphasize; she granted their knowledge legitimacy by committing it to the written word. She planted the flag in that land; it was hers."
"Suffice it to say, obstetrics only began to gain a foothold on birth in the mid-to-late 19th century, when white supremacist fears in the wake of the civil war, the increasing “professionalization” of medicine overall, and a rise of industrialization colluded to drive birth out of the community and into the hospital."
I really like "drive birth out of the community and into the hospital." While I've been reading about reproductive justice and the politics around birth for a while, I've never heard the transition from majority home births to hospitals put like that. It made me pause, sitting with the reality that birth - a personal, powerful thing - belongs not just to the person giving birth but their entire community. It's a part of culture and identity. It's a practice of creating and belonging.
...which promptly led me to wanting to slap myself on the forehead because in retrospect, DUH. OF COURSE.
tl;dr - GREAT essay, Robina. Thank you so much for writing and sharing it!
Thank you for all of this feedback. YES, part of what I wanted to allude to here is the way birth IS collective, not individual, even as systems try to convince us it is the latter.
Honestly I’d rather put my uterus in the hands of a birth worker who believes only women can give birth …even if she did get cranky at the neighbours for sending their kids to school ….and she had a controlling husband with a guru complex!
Black mothers having adverse birth outcomes due to “racism” is just as abstract as “inability to let go of control”. Only now the blame has shifted to system rather than individual.
Wow. Thank you so so much for sharing this knowledge and having the courage to call this righteous supremacy out. I hope many moms and children will be spared deep psychological and physical suffering because of your work.
I appreciate your thoughtful exploration of midwifery’s relationship to Ina May Gaskin. I’m going to sit in contemplation with the questions “what qualities do make a true elder?” And “how can any one among us grow wise and not merely old?” Thank you for sharing your thoughts and scholarship, and for inspiring this opportunity for growth in my own knowledge about the history of midwifery. These are important questions.
Also, additional comment / curiosity: I’m curious to know your thoughts (if you’re willing to share) on how to both hold a critique of racist tropes à la those you lift up in this piece, while also acknowledging that modern western birth care has historically failed to trust birthing bodies and did away with many of the simpler (yet effective) techniques practiced in indigenous contexts as a result, in favor of more invasive/intensive approaches?
Relatedly: the book “Childbirth Wisdom from the World’s Oldest Societies” was a fascinating read for me, covering numerous case studies compiled over many centuries and continents (mostly by white anthropologists) that included examples of Western docs’ astonishment at the relative lack of pregnancy / birth complications in indigenous cultures compared to their home contexts. (The book includes many citations of free births across the globe, though never for a first pregnancy; the author doesn’t promote that approach, simply notes its prevalence, focusing more on births scenarios with assistants present.) I was surprised at how much relief I felt reading it, upon realizing that pregnancy / birth isn’t always a highly dangerous experience for everyone (which, if I’m honest, was the impression given to me through the medical narrativizing I was exposed to). I know full well pregnancy CAN be risky in some cases, so am not suggesting otherwise; and I completely agree that the romanticization of indigenous birth practices has led to scary shit like elements of the current free birth movement. But I’ve also been wowed as I learn about how smoothly pregnancy/birth can often go when simpler methods are employed than the conventional modern Western approach. Obviously, communal context matters here, and the average Westerner doesn’t live in the contexts written about in the book I mention, but… any thoughts (or pieces you’ve already written) that speak to this?
So this was super helpful for me to read. In 2011 when I was pregnant with my first and choosing midwifes, I read a few of Gaskin's books and I was taken in - I was hungry for something to tell me "you can do this." I do remember the one thing that gave me pause was where she said you could just choose during childbirth to "be like a monkey" and that monkeys have no pain in birth - I remember thinking, ok, but their bodies and brains are somewhat different than mine. When I had an emergency c-section after getting to full un-medicated dilatation because the baby was "sunnyside up" I really did think for a long time it was because I had not "let go enough" or had ended up having fear. Reading this post so much clicked about what didn't feel right in those books at the time.
LAURA! I don't think I realized you were here lol. Thank you for sharing this, and I'm so glad this article resonated and gave some perspective that is maybe helpful.
You have written and pulled together threads I have also been tracking in my own way and I'm so grateful!
I have recently started calling myself a "recovering hippie." I am going on 20 years now of evolution from many years idealizing but at the same time skeptical of the hippies/homesteaders I made life amongst from my mid 20s to mid 30s. I'd never heard of home birth until I read Ina May's Guild to Childbirth when I got pregnant for the first time in 2006. I embraced it all- home birth, baby wearing, no vaccines, raw milk, making herbal medicine, growing food, etc etc etc. And I did it all in a small island full of white folks like me - classic hippies running away to try to create a utopia- that is made possible by Seattle adjacent microsoft, boeing kind of company, and folks now with small businesses built off generational privilege and cultural theft- no native people remain on the island. But I digress..... Luckily my social justice roots of my southern family came through and I got off the island to pursue a masters in anti-racist education; and later retrained as a doula - taking very different trainings- one from a black childbirth educator and one from a white hippie midwife (whose work is deeply problematic, but I had plans of writing a comparison piece between the trainings as an educational piece but never came to pass). All this was happening too as covid19 revealed who believed in public health and who believed in white exceptionalism. Thus the hippie to alt right pipeline revealed itself to me...
I recently read The Guardian piece on FBS so I'm glad you wove that in. As absolutely they are all connected. The other term that came to mind about The Farm is "regressive nostalgia;" which we are seeing now with this insane obsession with raw milk and beef tallow that the MAHA/MAGA sect idealizes. I see SO many other movements connected to this.... there's an academic on Substack who wrote a piece about clothing designer/rural dweller/homebirth mom Julie O'Rourke (Rudy Jude) who was seen at an RFK jr event, but also stylistically plays into this trope about regressive nostalgia i.e. a kind of purity culture if you will- and how this feeds into this certain California "natural" mom aesthetic that is so popular (sounds like hippies to me). No matter the style you favor it seems white supremacy is there- whether you want a cookie cutter home in a gated community near a mall church or you want a hand built home in rural Maine- white supremacy.
I think the point about whose elder is key here. I can only speak for myself as a white woman with no true culture to claim that because of this white people take it so personally when some hero they've invested in is toppled- like Ina May. Our cultural impoverishment fuels cultural theft. I do see some people doing good work around this but it sure seems rare and slow.
Anyways- really really appreciate you writing this and putting all these things together. I emailed this off to a couple birth work friends.
This piece is truly brilliant and necessary. THANK YOU. I didn't yet know much of this history (namely, about the Farm), so it was very informative. As someone who's long been interested in birth doula training and works as a spiritual care provider, I've seen Gaskin's work pop up a bunch in my searches, especially the Spiritual Midwifery book. I nearly bought it despite feeling uneasy about it, until I saw a review that featured a page from inside titled "Advice for Mother at the Time of Birth". Her guidance utterly horrified me:
- "At a birthing, the mother is the main channel of life force. If she is cooperative and selfless and brave, it makes there be more energy for everyone." Gaskin then says the birthing person needs to give some of that life force energy to the midwife, husband, and other people present, since the baby isn't out of the womb to cuddle with yet. The birthing person is thus not only responsible for birthing a child, but also responsible for managing + supplying everyone else's energy and cooperating with *their* energy needs (rather than prioritizing one's own in such an intense moment)... !?!??!?!??!
- "Don't complain, it makes things worse. If you usually complain, practice not doing it in pregnancy. It will build character." WUT. IS. THIS. TOXIC. POSITIVITY?
- "Talk nice. [When you ask your midwife/husband for something], ask real nice and give folks some when they give something for you." What is this ~be a good docile wife~ BS doing in a list of recs for birthers at the most intense moment of their lives, when they must also supposedly "surrender" to whatever is flowing through them? Wouldn't surrender also include emotions and expressions that are decidedly "not nice"?
Of course, the lingo was entirely cis-heteronormative, which I anticipated, but the onerous emphasis on making the husband happy even during birth was WILD.
And, as you wrote about, I did a triple-take when I read her bio on the back cover of her guide to childbirth, which legit stated she learned the "Gaskin maneuver" from indigenous midwives in Guatemala. Like... that makes it decisively ~not~ the "Gaskin" maneuver.
I've long cringed at the thought that she's been so instrumental to the midwifery industry. Thanks again for putting even better words to these impressions than I had before.
I almost cited that exact passage!! But the article was already long enough without me doing a close reading about my very objection about her books lol
LOL! glad I could fill in the gap 😅!
Wow. Lots of very interesting history. Wrapped in woke grievance mongering, that makes the reading an ordeal.
A white hippie helping the births of white hippies used white people illustrations! Oh no, how nasty of her. And she "stole" an indigenous maneuver that was freely shared with her and she shared it with the medical community. What a horrible thief! And you know.... to say "birthing mothers" would be transphobic, eh... whereas erasing born women from language is oh so au courant? Gadzooks...
Yawn. What a tedious comment we've all seen one thousand times (but thanks for driving some engagement toward my writing!).
My pleasure. :-)
I’ve told you this but what you’ve written about pain and labor stayed with me during contractions. I kept thinking “this is horrible. I hate this. Pain is a part of life and I’m not trying to erase the painful parts of life or birth.” I gave birth without an epidural to a big-ish OP baby and had zero spiritual epiphanies throughout (I also can imagine nothing more obnoxious than being asked questions while in labor). Afterward it felt really powerful to me that I think it was my first experience ever of being in pain and not trying to pretend I wasn’t. You helped lay the foundation for that and if I had surrounded myself with Ina May-type birth workers I think I would have had to work through a lot of shame afterward of being loud and of feeling miserable.
Thank you for connecting these threads so clearly. It seems so cool and so obvious to me that you’re out here doing things/justice-/birth- work and know the larger threads you’re a part of and are secure in that and wow is the contrast obvious with the commenters who get funny feelings when they read their work and don’t know why.
Always love your long form! Thank you!
Loved reading this - I also had a big OP baby, unmedicated, loud, and no epiphanies. (I think the birth was transformational in other ways, tho.) Robina's advice also helped me! SO, twinsies.
I volunteer as a doula now, and nurses do complain about loud birthers. So that fear isn't just internalized, it's a real one! I'm glad I was at home and had midwives who encouraged the loudness.
Every cell in my body was nodding along the whole time. Thank you for your utter devotion to your work.
I really appreciated your original IG post, and (while I'm sorry it may have been sparked by people's ignorant feedback) I was very moved by your expanding on it here. Thank you as always for so generously sharing your amazing scholarship, and wise reflections tying it all together.
Oh it was fine! I should have said, by and large, people seemed to take that post in the spirit it was intended, so in that regard I was happy to have posted it. It seemed to reassure a lot of people or relieve some self blame, which is always my goal. I maybe should write a more in-depth post about this! Thank you for commenting.
This needs to be read by every midwifery student in the country.
Planning to share it with my students!
A wonderful read! Over the years, I've heard about people's birth experiences at the "Farm" and saw Gaskin's book in midwifery reading lists, but never looked much deeper into her after I learned about her response to Tasha Portley's question. I appreciate more information about her being shared within the context of racist systems actively dismantling traditional, cultural midwifery ways of caring for birthgivers.
A few lines I appreciated most:
"...I think we owe it to ourselves and our sense of possibility to dig deeper about the narratives we inherit, to look at what and who is left out, and what work is to be done in those absences To live in the uncomfortable truths and contradictions that birth so beautifully lays bear rather than simply accept the easy and comfortable stories."
"In so doing she appealed for legitimacy from the very forces she herself had distinguished herself from — the medical industrial complex — by transforming an oral and sacred tradition into one that passed the test of “evidence based medicine.” Those midwives were illiterate, she was careful to emphasize; she granted their knowledge legitimacy by committing it to the written word. She planted the flag in that land; it was hers."
"Suffice it to say, obstetrics only began to gain a foothold on birth in the mid-to-late 19th century, when white supremacist fears in the wake of the civil war, the increasing “professionalization” of medicine overall, and a rise of industrialization colluded to drive birth out of the community and into the hospital."
I really like "drive birth out of the community and into the hospital." While I've been reading about reproductive justice and the politics around birth for a while, I've never heard the transition from majority home births to hospitals put like that. It made me pause, sitting with the reality that birth - a personal, powerful thing - belongs not just to the person giving birth but their entire community. It's a part of culture and identity. It's a practice of creating and belonging.
...which promptly led me to wanting to slap myself on the forehead because in retrospect, DUH. OF COURSE.
tl;dr - GREAT essay, Robina. Thank you so much for writing and sharing it!
Thank you for all of this feedback. YES, part of what I wanted to allude to here is the way birth IS collective, not individual, even as systems try to convince us it is the latter.
Honestly I’d rather put my uterus in the hands of a birth worker who believes only women can give birth …even if she did get cranky at the neighbours for sending their kids to school ….and she had a controlling husband with a guru complex!
Also you lost me at “the old tired transphobic tropes of only a woman can give birth”….🙃
Black mothers having adverse birth outcomes due to “racism” is just as abstract as “inability to let go of control”. Only now the blame has shifted to system rather than individual.
This was such an incredible read, and so well written, thank you!!!! I unlearned a lot!
Wow. Thank you so so much for sharing this knowledge and having the courage to call this righteous supremacy out. I hope many moms and children will be spared deep psychological and physical suffering because of your work.
I appreciate your thoughtful exploration of midwifery’s relationship to Ina May Gaskin. I’m going to sit in contemplation with the questions “what qualities do make a true elder?” And “how can any one among us grow wise and not merely old?” Thank you for sharing your thoughts and scholarship, and for inspiring this opportunity for growth in my own knowledge about the history of midwifery. These are important questions.
Also, additional comment / curiosity: I’m curious to know your thoughts (if you’re willing to share) on how to both hold a critique of racist tropes à la those you lift up in this piece, while also acknowledging that modern western birth care has historically failed to trust birthing bodies and did away with many of the simpler (yet effective) techniques practiced in indigenous contexts as a result, in favor of more invasive/intensive approaches?
Relatedly: the book “Childbirth Wisdom from the World’s Oldest Societies” was a fascinating read for me, covering numerous case studies compiled over many centuries and continents (mostly by white anthropologists) that included examples of Western docs’ astonishment at the relative lack of pregnancy / birth complications in indigenous cultures compared to their home contexts. (The book includes many citations of free births across the globe, though never for a first pregnancy; the author doesn’t promote that approach, simply notes its prevalence, focusing more on births scenarios with assistants present.) I was surprised at how much relief I felt reading it, upon realizing that pregnancy / birth isn’t always a highly dangerous experience for everyone (which, if I’m honest, was the impression given to me through the medical narrativizing I was exposed to). I know full well pregnancy CAN be risky in some cases, so am not suggesting otherwise; and I completely agree that the romanticization of indigenous birth practices has led to scary shit like elements of the current free birth movement. But I’ve also been wowed as I learn about how smoothly pregnancy/birth can often go when simpler methods are employed than the conventional modern Western approach. Obviously, communal context matters here, and the average Westerner doesn’t live in the contexts written about in the book I mention, but… any thoughts (or pieces you’ve already written) that speak to this?